Believe it or not, you can do a bit of research for the AP Lang argument essay in the leadup to the exam – even before you know what the prompt is.

Here’s a tip that the College Board won’t tell you: before you even get the prompt for the argument essay, brainstorm a list of debate topics and try to find connections between those topics and your life.

If you take this tip, it will be a big time-saver for you when you’re writing the exam.

The open-ended nature of the argument prompt gives you maximum topic flexibility, so you can actually do preparatory research by finding a list of debate topics – it’s likely a bunch of those topics will be relevant to the prompt. This means you can get most of your brainstorming done before the exam even starts, which will give you more time to actually write your essay, or to dedicate to other tricky sections like multiple choice.

And what about finding connections between those debate topics and your life? This is not me being a positive vibes teacher, trying to help you “feel” the material. It’s more about making the argument essay easier to write. The more relevant you can make it to your daily life, the easier it will be to express yourself in a memorable way.

Example of brainstorm approaches to the 2023 argument essay prompt

Let’s take the 2023 prompt, for example (page 12 in the link). It references Maxine Hong Kingston, “an award-winning writer famous for her novels depicting the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the United States.” It references a quote Kingston has made: “I think that individual voices are not as strong as a community of voices. If we can make a community of voices, then we can speak more truth.”

The prompt goes on to instruct you to write an essay “that argues your position on the extent to which Kingston’s claim about the importance of creating a community of voices is valid.”

Broadly speaking, what philosophical discussion is this prompt about?

Well, it seems to be about the importance of the community over the individual, or vice versa.

And if you’ve done your research beforehand, then a bunch of different broad debate topics can apply:

1. Eastern collectivism vs. Western individualism
2. What’s more important – the wishes of the majority or the wishes of a minority?
3. What should the limits of free speech be in a democracy?
4. What constitutes “truth” in a world of deep fakes and ChatGPT?

These are all topics you would’ve at least touched on in some of your high school courses (hopefully you’ve taken some courses in history, philosophy, sociology, etc. –  humanities and social science courses are good to take to prepare for the AP Language exam).

Now, let’s go over your options for how to put some of these topics (not all – because that would be aimless) into your essay.

How to structure your essay (it’s all about the body paragraphs)

The way I see it, you have three options.

Option one: 3 body paragraphs = 3 different debate topics

One strategy for scoring high on the argument essay is to take three of these topics and use them, respectively, for your three body paragraphs. The key thing here is to find an overarching trend that ties the three topics together so that they can form a specific thesis that is unique to you. Look for connections between the topics. For example, immigrants from non-western countries may come from collectivist societies, and guess what – they’re going to be a minority presence in western democratic society, which might make it tough for their voices to be heard. To tie things together further, many of these immigrants (either themselves or their descendants) may do away with their collectivist backgrounds in favour of more individual-focused ones, or may even take on complex hybrid identities, which makes the problem of allowing minority voices to thrive in a democracy even more difficult to solve – because why should an entire immigrant community get to decide the voice of a hybrid person within that community? Hopefully you get the idea. Just make sure you don’t go rambling on like a smartass, the way I did in this paragraph (in my defence it was to demonstrate how to connect separate topics). Pick your topics and make sure your stance on them is clear. Make sure it’s obvious what you’re arguing in favour of.

Option two: three body paragraphs = 2 debate topics + 1 personal example

You might also opt to use two of your brainstorm topics for two body paragraphs, because you can use an example from your life for the third one. Let’s take the immigrant and hybrid experience points from option one. If you yourself are from an immigrant family, it’s only natural to write up a life analogy that tells your story. Maybe it was the voicelessness you felt until you joined an association that promoted your culture. Or maybe it was how, historically, your culture endured discrimination until enough people of the culture banded together and got their voices heard. Or maybe you’re not from an immigrant family. But if you’re Canadian or American (and not Indigenous), chances are your ancestors were immigrants. Go far back in time – what trials did they go through? Did they need to form a community to have their voices heard? Or if you’re well-read enough you can always reference the life story of a famous ethnic or immigrant person. Just be sure it hits those points about “truth” and “community” (otherwise you risk coming across as “hey look at me, I’m pro-diversity, therefore score me higher”).

Option three: three body paragraphs = 1 debate topic + 1 personal example + 1 counter-argument

My personal favourite approach to figuring out body paragraphs is option three: pick one brainstormed debate topic, one personal experience, and one counter-argument that addresses the other side of the debate. For the latter, you’re basically imagining someone disagreeing with you and critiquing your points. What would you say back to them to defend your side of the argument? Your response, or counter, becomes the focus of your third body paragraph.

For example, let’s say you ended up arguing that in a democratic society, minorities need to come together as a community to have their voice heard – this idea that if you’re a minority, you need to find a community of that minority so you can join it and band together to get a stronger voice, one that can unearth “truth” (maybe truth is how the minority group is not present enough in leadership positions in corporations, governments, etc. And they need this presence to thrive as a community). And in paragraph two, you talk about how you joined an association of your culture at your school, and it was only through this association (strength in numbers) that you were able to put your culture on display (maybe it was a multicultural event or something like that). Thanks to the group you were able to fundraise, tell the story of your trials (as an ethnic group), and let other students see and understand the beauty of your culture.

That’s all fine and dandy, but what if you’re someone who isn’t really into your ethnic background? You’re sort of here in the west to blend in, ditch your origins. And you deal with this problem of people seeing you and your ethnic makeup and automatically assuming you’re all about that ethnic life. For this kind of person, is joining an ethnic association the only path to advancement? That seems kind of messed up.

This is what someone arguing against you might say. And now you need to mention their argument, which runs counter to yours, in your third body paragraph. And you also need to explain (with logic of course) why you’re still right – why banding together in an ethnic association is a good thing, even for people of that ethnicity who don’t care to be in that ethnicity.

So remember, when you’re brainstorming debate topics for the argument essay – don’t go in researching one side per topic. Know all the sides!

If the prompt is broad enough, you’d be surprised at the things you can talk about

Now, let’s say on your brainstorm list, there was a topic like the environment – more specifically, what can we do to save the environment, knowing that our global economic system is based on constant material consumption?

You may be thinking: “alright, this topic isn’t relevant to the prompt. May as well forget it.”

But this isn’t true. Try to think more broadly. How might a “community of voices” apply to the environment?

Well, climate change is a global problem. A lone green nation on one end of the earth is powerless to make a difference on a global scale. But what if they formed an alliance with other states in different parts of the globe? What if they formed a community, so to speak, to become stronger and put more pressure on the heavy greenhouse gas-emitting countries in the world?

But still, this is not good enough. Why? Because it ignores the “voices” and the “truth” part of the prompt. So let’s try to incorporate those.

What if we could form a “global community,” so to speak, not of countries, but of citizens in countries. We could get the citizens inside heavy greenhouse gas-emitting countries to make some noise to inspire change, within their respective countries. And because it’s a global network of citizens dong this, the pattern would allow the truth to prevail over not just climate change deniers, but lazy governments who gaslight their citizens with half-measures, like unambitious emissions targets or modest consumer purchase incentives (something sucky like we’ll give you a $1000 tax credit if you install $30 grand worth of solar. And when you say huh what, that’s not enough, they’ll say no it’s definitely enough – trust us, we’re the government).

So basically the community of voices (which consists of concerned and protesting citizens around the globe) brings out the truth about the climate change. And we wouldn’t have this truth without their advocacy, because governments try to hide climate change realities with their gaslighting and their half measures.

IMPORTANT POINT: Notice I’m trying to avoid making it about climate change deniers. This is because it’s a bit too simple for the kind of sophistication required of the AP Language exam. At this point, most people know climate change is real and happening. The deniers are a fringe group not really worth our time. But deceptive politicians are much more dangerous to society – they acknowledge climate change, making themselves appear trustworthy, but their actions (or lack of actions) have devastating environmental consequences.

Preparing for the argument prompt – your takeaway

Basically, you have endless topic opportunities in any given argument essay, and it’s all because the prompt the College Board gives you is super broad. It’s almost like a bone structure for a debate scenario that can be applied to multiple fields. So the more debate topics you know (and make sure you know them well – know the different sides), the easier the argument prompt will be for you.

BUT BE CAREFUL: you do not want to force one of your brainstorm topics onto the prompt. Do a quick argument outline to be sure that your logic will check out. If in doubt, ditch it and move on to more relevant topics on your list.

The post How to Study for the AP Language Argument Essay (Without Even Knowing the Prompt) appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

These simple tips can help you ace the AP Lang rhetorical analysis essay.

The AP Language rhetorical analysis essay is tricky because you’re essentially writing an argument about how a writer writes an argument. So you end up with this distance you have to deal with – you’re writing is not about your own argument; it’s about someone else’s. But wait a minute, you’re still writing an argument, so…

This distance makes the rhetorical analysis essay meta, and meta things can bog you down and overcomplicate your writing. It can also take you down a wholly different path: you might end up half-assing your analysis or failing to get into specifics, which can lead to oversimplified claims that’ll make the grader feel you’re not up to the challenge of writing at a college student-level.

So what can you do to impress the grader and make them feel you have college-worthy argumentation? I will tell you.

Don’t say the author uses x, y, and z rhetorical devices

I see this over and over. Students saying “the author uses metaphor, irony, and parallelism to convey his love of (insert thing author loves here).” Don’t do this. It tells the grader nothing. Why? Because you haven’t explained what the metaphor is, what the irony is, what the parallelism is, and how all three are tied together and relevant to the author’s love of (insert thing author loves here). This kind of writing is merely functional – it reads almost like a technical manual an engineer (who doesn’t know/care about good writing) might write. It lacks personality.

I’m not trying to be mean. If you write like this, surely you have a personality. You just need to bring it out in your writing.

HOWEVER you are writing about someone else’s writing, which makes things complicated. So what’s the next best thing you can do? Well, you can bring out that someone else’s personality.

Here’s how to do it. Let’s use Michael Pollan’s writing as an example. Pollan is a nature writer a lot of AP Language teachers like to assign to their students. His essay, Weeds Are Us, has a lot of interruptions (in the form of parentheses, aka the brackets holding this clause together), and asyndeton, which is a rhetorical strategy that uses commas to link (or separate) ideas.

You can see for yourself. Here’s the first two paragraphs of his essay:

So we’ve figured out two rhetorical devices we want to talk about: parentheses and asyndeton.

*A QUICK NOTE: Keep in mind I’ve narrowed the scope of parentheses and asyndeton just to keep things simple for the purpose of this article. They have broader applications than what I’ve described above, but we’ll save that for another article.

Don’t write like this:

Michael Pollan uses parentheses and asyndeton to convey his understanding of romantic thinkers.

Instead, write like this:

Michael Pollan’s writing style is fast-moving and loaded with detail. He builds ridiculously long lists and interrupts himself (via parentheses) with sarcastic remarks to convince his readers that we should question the relevance of Romantic-era thinking in solving modern environmental problems.

You can see I have downplayed the actual rhetorical terms (parentheses and asyndeton) in this thesis – in fact I didn’t even bother to mention asyndeton. These are just jargon words at the end of the day and they’re not important. What’s important is defining them, and describing how they work to convey the writer’s personality. I can always drop the exact technical term later on if want to, in the body paragraphs.

Your takeaway here is to use personality-driven words (in my case with Pollan, it was fast-moving, loaded, ridiculous, interrupts, and sarcastic) to describe the writer’s rhetorical strategy.

A step-by-step outline of this thesis writing process might look like:

1. Identify the actual rhetorical strategies a writer uses (aka the jargony terms).
2. Take a look at the terms all together, holistically, to see how they’re an embodiment of the writer’s unique personality. Remember, you don’t have to identify every single term. Two or three key ones will suffice.
3. In your own words, describe the personality (with as much detail as you can).
4. Use your personality descriptors in your thesis.

Use the clue in the prompt

There’s a reason AP Language teachers are obsessed with the context in which a writer writes. It provides the information you need to frame your understanding of the passage, which will make it easier for you to say something insightful about the passage.

In the case of the rhetorical analysis essay, it couldn’t be easier. The prompt practically gives you a bone structure for your thesis.

Let’s take a look at the passage that was provided for the rhetorical analysis essay in 2022 (on page 11 in the document).

You’ll notice in the prompt it says: Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Sotomayor (the first Latina justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) makes to convey her message about her identity.

There’s your clue right there. The prompt has basically given you a framework for at least part of your thesis. You just need to flesh it out. What is Sotomayor’s message? What is her identity? Message and identity are two abstractions you can fill in, based on what you glean from the passage. But don’t short-change Ms. Sotomayor. Simply saying she’s a Latina (identity) who believes in Latin-American advancement (message) is too basic. What kind of specific trials (no pun intended) or obstacles do Latinas tend to go through that other ethnicities (or even Latinos, their male equivalents) don’t? What might Latin-American advancement actually look like, at ground level in day-to-day life, or at the level of policy? Is Sotomayor even concerned with trials and obstacles at all – is she concerned about something else? Make sure you come up with something specific enough to do justice (I’m really not a pun guy – seriously) to the prompt. Don’t be lazy! Dig as deep as you can.

If you take a look at the top sample essay provided by the College Board (which is 2A, on p. 6), the student describes Sotomayor not simply as a Latina, but as a “product of America’s diversity” and “the daughter of Puerto Ricans.” These are terms that hint at the specificity of Sotomayor’s experience as a “New Yorkrican,” which is what her speech is all about. The student also describes the message not as mere Latina advancement or struggles, but as the idea that “identities shouldn’t be black and white” (meaning one clear thing vs. another clear thing), and the student also roots this black-white description in ongoing debates in America about homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, which Sotomayor also alludes to. It all begs an alluring question – how specific can an ethnic identity be?

Don’t write like this (but do use it as a framework):

Sotomayor conveys her message by sharing her identity.

Instead, write like this:

Sotomayor shares her unique experience as a “New Yorkrican” to convince viewers that a salad bowl approach to society is more accepting of intra-cultural nuances than a melting pot approach.

You’ll notice I flipped the framework in my correct example – I describe the identity before the message. This is fine too. Do whatever flows with you. You’re writing on a time crunch, after all.

Bottom line here is: use the clue, but only as a framework to dig deeper.

Don’t forget to dive into the subject the writer is writing about

So you’ve figured out the rhetorical strategies the author is using, you’ve figured out what the personality of the author is, and you understand the author’s argument. But can you envision other people who may disagree with the author’s argument? And these other people – what’s their aim? What do they want?

If you can’t answer these questions, it means you don’t have a good grasp of the subject. And you’re going to struggle to get a good grade on your essay if you don’t know the subject.

Let’s go back to the Sotomayor example. You’ll see the top student in the sample essays describes the subject (you can find this on p. 6, in the student’s intro) as “debates between a homogeneous vs. heterogeneous society in regards to cultural identities.”

You’ll notice this isn’t the most pristine description in the world, but the student still manages to tap into this debate idea of the kind of co-existence policy America should advocate: melting pot or salad bowl. You’ll notice also Sotomayor mentions this debate situation herself, in her speech.

What makes this top student really succeed is how they’re able to keep looping back to this debate subject in their essay. Closing sentences in this student’s paragraphs include:

 “…[Latina] cultural identity has many layers.”

“…. reinforces that there isn’t a single experience or quality that make a person a single cultural identity.”

“She maintains that there are so many factors that contribute to cultural identity, not just common languages or foods, that drawing distinct separations between them simply cannot be done.”

You’ll notice all of these phrases keep looping back to the subject Sotomayor is engaged in, which, to boil it down to simple terms, is the debate between melting pot and salad bowl. The student clearly describes what’s at stake if America takes the melting pot route, and by describing this, the student addresses the other side of the argument (or in other words: all the people out there who might disagree with Sotomayor’s salad bowl/intra-cultural nuance advocacy).

As I mentioned before, this student’s writing isn’t the most vivid or pristine, but it gets the job done. And although the student might lack serious writing chops, they make up for it with sophisticated thinking and genuine engagement with the subject. And guess what – that’s enough to earn them the sophistication point.

So it’s not game over if you don’t have the most sophisticated writing in the world. In the scoring commentary (see p. 13, at the top), the grader awarded the sophistication point to this student for their “nuanced understanding” rather than their “writing style.”

Just make sure you don’t think you can get away with bad writing, because this student’s writing is good. It’s just, in the College Board’s terms, not “consistently vivid and persuasive.” In other words, it’s good, but not great.

DISCLAIMER: Make sure you’re confident of your analysis skills

Keep in mind this is not a deep dive into what makes a good rhetorical analysis essay. It’s just some quick tips you can apply to your writing which can give you the push you need to score higher on the essay. These are not shortcuts. They’re reminders for how you should be presenting your analysis. You should definitely be confident of your analysis skills before you go into the exam – the graders are too smart to be fooled by an essay that only looks good on the surface. However, the way you present yourself and communicate your findings is crucial. What I’m trying to say is if a genius can’t present her own genius, then no one will know she’s a genius. So these are a set of tips that’ll help you ensure you’re looking composed and presentable in front of the grader. My point here is that you’ll need composure and presentation to maximize your score.

The post How To Get Full Marks on Your AP Language Rhetorical Analysis Essay appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

Due to how much our society encourages bullshitting, many students BS on their essays without even knowing it. Here’s how to identify your BS, and change your ways.

Many students BS not because they’re trying to be sinister deceivers, but because they don’t know what they’re doing.

And if a BSer can discover that they’re BSing, it means they can be rescued. This is assuming, of course, that they are willing to be rescued.

So this article is all about determining what it means to BS and what BSing looks like, so that you can make sure you’re on team realness aka all the legit writers out there who have actual things to say.

And yes, I may as well mention here that I’m an Advanced Placement English Language and Composition teacher who has seen all kinds of BS. I have been so drowning in BS (I realize the literal visual of that is gross – sorry) that I have even assigned the BS-filled public relations statements of adults to my constantly BSing students, so that they can analyze and deconstruct the statements and perhaps even see that they, mere students, have it in them to be BS-free and better at writing than people more than twice their age.

Let us define BSing (short for “bullshitting”) as the tactic a person uses to fool others into thinking that he is knowledgeable in a given subject, and worthy of being heard and respected.

So here’s the three major examples of BSing I’ve seen.

Beating around the bush with abstract phrases

Instead of talking about the struggles of low-wage workers living in urban centers, a chronic BSer will tell you about the “various aspects of economically disadvantaged people living in major metropolises.” What’s the difference? The BSer is using broader, more abstract language to describe a phenomenon, rather than concrete, visually descriptive language. You’ll notice many of these abstract phrases are also bigger words with higher syllable counts. Bigger words and higher syllable counts are a disguise BSers use to hide the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s a pretty bad disguise if you think about it, sort of like if an undercover cop with a five o’clock shadow wore a Supreme t-shirt to bust some grade niners who were up to something illegal. Yet the disguise works on many people, due to how our politicians also BS a lot, which sadly validates BSing in our society.

Don’t write like this:

“Joe Schmitt talks about various aspects of economically disadvantaged people living in major metropolises.”

Instead, write like this:

“Joe Schmitt talks about the struggles of low-wage workers living in urban centers.”

I could spend an entire article talking about the differences above, but I won’t, so here’s a quick analysis:

“Low-wage” is two syllables compared to the nine of “economically disadvantaged.”  You’ll also notice it helps explain exactly how the economic disadvantage is working – it comes from low wages. “Workers” helps you visualize people actually working (maybe in a mine or a field or a warehouse) rather than “people,” which is more generic and open to interpretation.

Inventing illogical significance points

Including a significance factor in your essay is usually the most important thing you can do to bump yourself up to an A. But it’s difficult to pull off, which may lead to some BSing (whether accidental or not).

Here’s how it usually happens. Let’s say you’re writing an essay about whether or not the United States should add more nuclear power sources to their power grid. And you decide to side with the idea that yes, they should. So you’re trying to think up why it’s important for the US to be pro-nuclear power, and so off the top of your head, you say yes, they should add more nuclear power sources, as this would encourage more efforts at making nuclear power sources safer and less prone to accidents.

What’s wrong with the scenario above? Well, this is an idea that the student more or less pulled out of their ass – there’s no real process of logical reasoning behind it. We can even look at the example above in very simple equation-form to see if the logic checks out.

Basically the student is saying:

More nuclear power sources = safer nuclear power.

As you can see, it doesn’t take a logic mastermind to tell you this doesn’t make sense. And most English teachers, especially if they’re AP Language graders or college professors, will actually be logic masterminds, so you do not want to mess with them.

Don’t argue like this:

Yes, the US should adopt more nuclear power sources in their grid because more nuclear power sources = safer nuclear power.

Instead, argue like this:

Yes, the US should adopt more nuclear power sources in their grid because more nuclear power sources = a feasible approach to move away from fossil fuels – this is because we have developed the technology for nuclear already, unlike renewable sources like wind and solar, which we’re still trying to economize for higher scale production.

As you can see above, the corrected example has a significance factor that relies on the logic of possibility – it’s telling us the formula works because it is possible to achieve (possibility was one of Aristotle’s tips for logical argument), and it goes on to explain how the possibility works. Describing how your idea has a high possibility or feasibility-level is one great way to describe the significance of your argument.

So the bottom line here is: use a known and respected logical strategy to describe the significance of your argument, rather than something off the top of your head that’s maybe only vaguely related to the subject you’re writing about.

Simping the author

This is when, instead of discussing the subject an author is writing about, you put the author on a pedestal and praise the author for being great at writing. I’ll often see students do this when they’re trying to fill up an empty-looking sentence or paragraph.

For example, let’s say you’re writing on an author who wrote a creative non-fiction piece about life in an ethnoburb, (an ethnoburb is basically a well-to-do suburb with a unique, usually singular, non-white ethnic concentration). And you want to talk about a simile the author uses. Let’s say the simile is about how the import mangoes available in the mom-and-pop grocery stores in this ethnoburb are like being back in the home country, let’s say Pakistan, where you can climb mango trees in people’s backyards and taste unparalleled freshness and sweetness. So in your essay you talk about how the author’s simile about mangoes in the home country is such a great strategy to make the reader feel what it’s like to live in the ethnoburb, and you also say it’s really admirable how transported readers become when they read this author’s writing.

The problem is you sound like a suck up. And you’re not writing your essay to suck up. You’re writing it to contribute to the subject that this mango ethnoburb writer is talking about. It doesn’t matter that you’re just a student and the mango author is published and legit and in-the-workforce. Think higher of yourself and give this author a real critique. You don’t need to bash him – you can even just build off his idea or take an alternate viewpoint or move the conversation to a different, but related, subject. Your goal is to be an academic professional with a respectable viewpoint – not a suck up to other authors.

Don’t write like this:   

“The author’s excellent simile about climbing mango trees is a great way to put readers in his mind.”

Instead, write like this:

“The author’s simile about climbing mango trees demonstrates the success of ethnoburbs in western nations – specifically how they’re a great way for immigrants to lay down new roots without cutting out the roots of their home countries.”

You’ll notice in the corrected example above, I’ve moved the focus from praising the author to praising (or rather advocating) the thing that the author is praising: ethnoburbs. The validity of ethnoburbs in western nations is the subject of my essay; not the mango author. So if you’re someone who’s got this positive vibe energy that just can’t be stopped, channel that energy into praising a possible solution or angle in the subject. It’ll be much more academic and professional than putting another writer on a pedestal.

Your Takeaway – BSing is getting more dangerous

Moral Philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a book On Bullshit (that’s literally the title), where he suggested that BSers are more dangerous than liars because liars know the difference between truth and reality (they just choose to lie). Meanwhile BSers don’t care – they’re cool with making things up and actually believing in those things. Which takes us to where we are now in 2023 with the spread of fake news, and deep fakes, and any other buzz phrase with the word “fake” in it that I may be missing. And ChatGPT – one University of Toronto professor at the Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology argues that ChatGPT is the kind of BSer that Harry Frankfurt had in mind when he wrote his book, and this is because ChatGPT creates content for us without caring about the truth of its content (because that content comes from humans, who are full of BS). But obviously some content it creates will be truthful and correct, which gives it a kind of faux validity that might allow us to let its other BS slide (again, sorry about the gross literal visual).

ChatGPT ramifications can be especially dangerous when we consider the BSing strategy of inventing illogical significance points to push forward damaging ideas, such as accusing your country of committing election fraud, or arguing that climate change doesn’t exist. The same can be said of beating around the bush with abstract phrases – these abstract phrases can conceal violent realities that corporations or governments don’t want you to hear about. It might be the “upsetting event” where a United Airlines passenger got forced out of his seat and badly beaten by airline and airport staff, or the “threat reduction” that took place when policymakers and military officials ordered a drone strike that killed not just their living, breathing, human target, but all living, breathing civilians near the target too.

Which means this is needless to say, but I’ll say it anyways: don’t BS in your essays. And don’t think ChatGPT can help you ditch your BSing habits either.

The post How to Tell if You Bullshit in Your Essays (and How to Write BS-Free if You do) appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

Whether you’re taking AP Language or AP Literature, you should avoid these phrases. In fact, you should avoid them in any essay or written piece you ever write.

Every English teacher, while grading, will come across cookie-cuttered writing that makes them think “yup, here’s another student who writes without thinking.”

I’m talking about broad, catch-all phrases like “positive” or “negative,” or passive voice phrases like “this can be seen.”

I’m not sure where these phrases came from or why they’re still in circulation, but they’re out there, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere. And this is kind of sad to say, but by simply avoiding them, you can make yourself look further along in your education than your peers.

Who should we blame for the rampant use of these phrases? Students? Teachers? School systems? A society which encourages thoughtless language? It’s hard to say, and it’s not the focus of this article.

If you want to stand out from the crowd or if you need to impress a grader (such as an AP English Language grader) with writing that goes beyond a high school-level, you’ll want to avoid the phrases below.

“This can be seen”

This is one of the most common examples of passive voice, which is basically when someone describes an action, but doesn’t attribute an actor to the action. It’s like when the military says “the target was neutralized,” which is a trick they use to sound less violent with the public. Students, I like to think, are not as sinister or bureaucratic as the military, so typically they’ll use these kind of phrases when they’re not conscious of what they’re doing – like if they’re stuck in a passive voice habit.

Don’t write like this:

“There are many coming-of-age moments in To Kill a Mockingbird. This can be seen when Scout…..“

Instead, write like this:

“There are many coming-of-age moments in To Kill a Mockingbird. Examples include the scene where Scout…..”

“This is shown”

Another passive voice phrase – I see students use this when they’re trying to get into their analysis.

Don’t write like this:

“To Kill a Mockingbird contains symbols that illustrate the origins of racial prejudice in America. This is shown when Scout encounters…”

Instead, write like this:

“To Kill a Mockingbird contains symbols that illustrate the origins of racial prejudice in America. Lee uses one such symbol when Scout encounters…”

You can see in the corrected example above, I’ve used “Lee,” the author’s name, which means I’ve attributed an actor to an action. My example could be even more rudimentary – instead of “this is shown…” you could say “Lee shows us this…” – it’s not the best correction but at least it gets you away from passive voice.

Keep in mind there are protocols to follow when introducing authors in your writing (in this case I’ve cut straight to the author’s last name, which means I’ve introduced the author’s full name and credentials earlier in the written piece). I’ll have an article on these protocols later.

“Positive” and “negative”

Even adults often write with these phrases, so don’t beat yourself up too much if you do too. But still – don’t describe things by calling them positive or negative. These are sweeping phrases which are so broad in meaning that your essay will lose the chance to be unique, and it’s all because your descriptive phrases are too generic and…. don’t really describe. What’s worse is that since the phrases are so broad and multi-meaninged, your reader might come up with their own meaning, separate from your intended meaning, and you can’t blame them – you didn’t describe it in enough detail for them!

Don’t write like this:

“Atticus offers Scout an opportunity to think like an adult when …… This positive experience allows Scout to …..”

“The long stretches of time away from Dill leads to negative effects on Scout.”

Instead, write like this:

“Atticus offers Scout an opportunity to think like an adult when …… This experience, which eventually allows her to be wiser than her peers, allows Scout to …..”

“The long stretches of time away from Dill causes Scout to feel lonely and attention-hungry.”

“Mindset”

This phrase is not so bad on it’s own – the issue is it’s become a cliché (and like positive and negative, it’s used by adults too). When a grader sees the same phrase in use by all writers, over and over again, those writers are going to lose individuality and uniqueness (in the eyes of the grader). Is the grader going to be overtly thinking this, dehumanizing innocent students trying to do good in school? I doubt it – it’s not like the grader is a monster. These things happen at the unconscious level. So become unique, and get noticed.

Don’t write like this:

“Scout’s mindset gets in the way when she argues with Jem.”

“In her argument with Jem, Scout has a rebellious mindset.”

Instead, write like this:

“Scout’s rebellious nature comes out when she questions her brother’s ‘maddening superiority’ (150).”

As with all things psychological and mind-related, you don’t want to merely describe the thought or feeling. It’ll make your writing dry and overly technical. Instead, aim to showcase the thought or feeling in action. If the “mindset” you’re getting at is aggression, just use the word aggression, and then show an example of the aggression coming out in behaviour. That’s all it takes – you do that and you’re good.

“In line #”/ ”on page #”

This is a huge amateur mistake. Never do this! Your goal in writing is to help your reader visualize an idea or an argument or a feeling – to use words to help them see a scene. If this is the goal, then why are you throwing arbitrary line and page numbers in your prose? Save these for your in-text citations – otherwise you risk not getting taken seriously by your grader.

Don’t write like this:

“In line 56 of Act I, scene 1, Hamlet utters his famous words, ‘To be, or not to be?’”

“In Chapter 3, Scout gets in a fight with Walter Cunningham.”

“Scout’s commitment to non-violence, which is mentioned on page 89, …”

Instead, write like this:

“Hamlet’s famous words, “To be, or not to be,” (3.1.56) are iconic because….”

“Scout’s fight with Walter Cunningham demonstrates …. (include page # here)”

“Scout’s commitment to non-violence, which she describes as a ‘policy of cowardice,’ (89)…”

“Used,” as in “the rhetorical device used above”

This is another passive voice sin you’ll want to avoid. I see it when students are in analysis mode, and they’ve described how an author is using a rhetorical device, and they’re trying to reference it again. Like the other examples, it shows hesitation, reluctance, lack of awareness – all undesirable traits when you’re trying to impress someone, including a grader.

Don’t write like this:

 “The rhetorical device used above suggests ….”

Instead, write like this:

“Lee’s symbolism in this passage suggests…”

You’ll notice also, if we consider the objective we have as writers (which is to use words to help the reader visualize something), then we can also view the word “above” as an arbitrary phrase about the position of text on your literal paper or digital document – and if this is the kind of thing you’re trying to get your reader to visualize, you’re going to put them to sleep!

“Relates”

Here’s one of those phrases that is purely functional in writing – and to a fault. This one can be particularly frustrating for graders because the whole point of analysis in an essay is to describe the nature of the relationship between things. So if all you say is “this thing relates to this other thing,” it means you’re not describing the relationship, which goes against the whole purpose of an essay. And, like I said, it’ll frustrate the grader. And you don’t want a frustrated grader grading your essay.

Don’t write like this:

“Scout’s inability to sympathize with Walter Cunningham’s table manners relates to the theme of childhood innocence in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Instead, write like this:

“Scout’s inability to sympathize with Walter Cunningham’s table manners presents us with one possible argument about the theme of childhood innocence in To Kill a Mockingbird: that yes, we should look to children to scrutinize our society’s morals, but we need to guide their thinking too (the way Calpurnia does) in order to get the most from their insights.”

You’ll notice the corrected example above is significantly longer, and that’s the way it should be in this case. It’s the nature of the relationship that you want to dig into. This is the thing that’s supposed to make your essay interesting, so describe it.

And a quick side note: you’ll notice I mentioned a thing Calpurnia does in the corrected example – I’ve written it based on the premise that I’ve described the thing she’s done (which is scolding Scout) in the essay already. So keep that in mind too. Make sure the reader understands every little thing you’re referencing.

There are more bad phrases out there

These are not the only examples of words to avoid – there are many more out there, and you don’t need to memorize them all (memorizing things to avoid would probably be a little strange, anyways).

Think instead of your key takeaways:

• Avoid phrases that give you passive voice.
• Avoid phrases that make you look like a robot rather than a unique individual.
• Avoid phrases that disengage the reader from the scene or idea you’re building.

Alright fine, those are still things to avoid, and I’m telling you to memorize them… don’t worry, I’ll come up with a more POSITIVE conclusion for my next article.

The post Don’t Use These Phrases in your AP English Essay (or any essay, for that matter) appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

A couple things you can do that might bump you up to a level 4 or 5.

You can’t really cram for the AP English Language exam. Despite all the fancy terminology and resources The College Board might have in their database (such as videos like this), it’s a skill-based exam at the end of the day. The way it works is you go in on exam day and get your exam package and that’s it – those are your “study” materials, so to speak, right there in the package. You study them on the spot and apply your skills. So there’s no point in memorizing all the readings you may (or may not) have done in your AP course throughout the year, because you’ll be applying your skills to the writing samples you end up with on the exam.  And I’m not gonna lie to you – if you don’t have the skills by now, you’re kind of screwed.

I’m talking about your reading comprehension ability, your ability to synthesize other writers’ arguments, to write good sentences under pressure – these, among others, are the skills that have to be mastered before exam day. And it takes months if not years of training to build these skills.

So, assuming you’ve at least built these skills up to a borderline level 3 level, what else can you do to prepare for the exam, and possibly bump yourself up to a 4, or even 5?

Get out from under your rock and read the news

In his treatise on rhetoric, Aristotle told his students to “see the available means of persuasion in each case.” What does this mean? Basically Aristotle wanted his students to get good at recognizing debate situations and topics. He wanted them to recognize the arguments of all sides in a debate, to the point that they (his students) knew all the weaknesses and strengths that come with those sides. The goal was not to become invested in an issue; it was to recognize all available persuasive opportunities within it.

Aristotle’s advice to his students still applies to the AP Language exam today. It’s particularly useful for the “argument essay” you’ll have to write – this is the one where you get a broad prompt and no accompanying text. You’ll have to rely on your own life experience and awareness of different debate topics to answer it.

So read the news. What are the debate topics and issues of the day, and what are people saying about them? You can even check in on those political panels that happen on the major news networks, where these big shot official-looking people show up to offer insightful comments on issues at hand. Maybe it’s how to respond to climate change. Maybe it’s about international trade deals affecting local workers. Whatever it is, listen to what they’re saying and see the different points and counter-points they make against one another. Soak it all in with a sense of neutrality – remember, your goal is to be good at rhetoric aka persuasion, not to be an advocate for any of these issues. Of course you can personally take a side on a debate topic if you want – just don’t let it get in the way of “seeing the available means of persuasion.”

Once you know a situation, you can take a stance on it. And your stance will be all the stronger because you know what all the sides are saying, so you can respond with counterpoints accordingly.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m gonna say, and this is an unofficial, unscientific statistic, that 95% of the time it’s a bad idea to go looking for quality arguments in YouTube comments (and comments sections in general). So maybe don’t bother with that.

Do a mock exam (if you haven’t already) and readjust your time gauge

Hopefully by now you’ve done a mock exam to prepare for the real exam. What was the section on the exam that took you the longest? The suggested time allotments are outlined on the College Board’s website. As of the time of this posting, it should take you 40 minutes for the rhetorical analysis essay, 40 minutes for the open response essay (or “argument” essay, as the College Board calls it), 55 minutes for the synthesis essay (this includes a 15 min reading time), and 60 minutes to complete the 45 questions in the multiple choice section. Focus on the section you struggled with most – maybe you didn’t complete it or maybe it became a big time sink. Reflect on what happened – where in your question-answering process did you get blocked up?

This might come across as very obvious advice, but I’ve known many students that didn’t bother going back to the drawing board after they struggled with a section, even though they knew they had struggles! So try it again, maybe with a different approach. And maybe also communicate your struggles to your teacher, and see what they have to say.

Get serious about rhetorical devices

It’s not enough to merely identify a rhetorical device. Nor is it enough to identify it and say that the device “emphasizes” a writer’s point. This is obvious, and will make your exam grader sad, mad, or sad and mad combined. What your grader (and also just people in general) care about is the actual tangible experience that takes place when this emphasis happens. How the heck is the emphasis working??? Your grader wants to know.

For example, let’s say you’re talking about Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and you want to talk about the line where he says, “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Do not say Martin Luther King’s mining imagery emphasizes his point. Instead, talk about how his mining imagery conveys a tedious, workman-like approach to rebuilding race relations in America.

Revisit a text you’ve already read

Hopefully you’ve taken an AP course, or maybe self-studied for one, or maybe you think you’re a scholastic baller who’s got the skills already, so why not go for the exam? Whichever of these categories you fall in, revisit a text you’ve read before, preferably something non-fiction, or just something where you know (through your prior work with the text) what the author’s argument is. Revisit it and check out the rhetorical strategies the author uses (whether it is a specific moment of logic, or a specific moment in his language, like a rhetorical device). Check out what the author did in that moment (pick just one moment! And make sure it’s specific! This is my teacher voice talking!), and practice describing the specific technique you see on the page, how the author uses it in the moment, and also how it ties to the author’s overall argument. In other words, get comfortable with shifting your scale from micro to macro – this is a skill you’ll need on the exam because it demonstrates your ability to work with a specific rhetorical strategy, as well as your ability to apply that strategy to a broader point, where the stakes of the argument matter.

It might be nice if you understand the way an ironic comment is working – but your understanding won’t carry much weight if you can’t tie that moment of irony to a larger point the author is making.

There’s gotta be more tips out there, but these are my four go-to strategies – I tell them to my students when our course ends. I now must include an obligatory line saying, “what last minute strategies do you have? Are they different from the ones above? Post them in the comments below!” so there you have it, go ahead and post them.

The post Last Minute Study Tips for the AP English Language and Composition Exam appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

It’s pretty hard. You will have to write 3 essays and answer 45 multiple choice questions in one sitting. One essay alone is enough to tire a writer out so yeah, it’s hard.

Obviously it’s not impossible though, and people do score level 3 and above every year (290, 071 students did in 2022). So how about I, an AP Language teacher, explain to you what exactly makes it a tough exam.

Pushes your writing stamina to the limit

Back in my undergrad days, I’d have to write these end-of-term in-class exams, which were always hectic. They would involve short answer questions, long answer questions, and usually one essay question at the end. I remember saving my thinking strength for that final essay question because I knew it would take the most brainpower, the most amount of critical thinking and connection-making between concepts. I hated in-class exams and I always felt dead after them. I also always had to use the bathroom very badly afterwards.

When I learned that the AP Language exam had not one, not two, but three essay questions, I immediately felt bad for my students and wondered how The College Board could be so sadistic.

But we don’t have time to lament the sadistic world we live in so why don’t I tell you about the three essays you’ll have to write.

You’ll have to:

1.  write a synthesis essay that incorporates other writers’ ideas into your own unique idea (this essay includes a collection of readings you’ll have to research and consider),
2. write a rhetorical analysis essay that makes an argument about the language choices in a given passage,
3.  and write an open-response essay that answers a broad prompt (with examples).

All three essays will need to have intros, conclusions, body paragraphs, theses, etc. etc. That’s a lot of brainpower.

So if you’re like me and you’re one of those kids who never manages to finish an in-class essay early, who always milks every second they can to do the best job they can, and who always has to use the bathroom very badly afterwards because the test is so dang long and maybe you drank too much water to keep yourself hydrated, then you’re in for a tough time.

But it’s doable as long as you pace yourself and keep your cool – as long as you practice writing and arguing until it feels innate. If you feel yourself struggling to write every time you’re tasked with writing an essay (especially in-class, under time pressure), then it means you’re not ready. You need more practice before you take on the exam.

Multiple choice section will try to trick you

Many of the multiple choice questions will offer multiple true answers. So if, in a given question, all possible answer options are truthful, how do you know which one to pick? This dilemma is what makes the multiple choice section so hard.

The key is in finding the most correct answer. And to find the most correct answer, you need to be aware of the overall tone or vibe or argument of the reading passage. Let that tone or vibe or argument inform your choice of answer.

You may encounter some multiple choice questions where only one answer is true, but the other selections are so broad, vague, and confusing that it leaves your brain in a bored jumble. You may zone out and think about inappropriate hormonal things, or even faraway memories like the time your friend roofed a soccer ball.

In either scenario (whether it’s multiple true answers or the zone out), the multiple choice section is trying to trick you. And if you let it trick you, it will drain out your time and your brainpower, which you’ll need for the essay-writing section. So obviously drained out brainpower = bad score.

Graders won’t tolerate your BS

This is going to make me sound like an egomaniac, but AP Language teachers and graders really are cut from a different cloth. They are writing and prose fanatics, so you won’t have any luck BSing your way through the essays. I’m not sure if you have an English teacher who might give you a B even though you BS in your essays – but if you do this on the exam, you’ll fail.

What is BSing (bullshitting) exactly? It comes in many forms. One of the most common examples is using jargony, multi-syllabic language, like “render inoperative” rather than something more real and in-your-face, like “kill.”

Other times it may take the form of using broad, vague phrases that show a reluctance, on the writer’s part, to engage with the subject. Like let’s say you’re subject is supposed to be about the impact that a tough-on-crime policy might have on poorer neighborhoods. If the student is BSing, they might say something like “aspects of government policy can have impacts on certain neighborhoods.”

What aspects??? What policy??? What impacts???? Which neighborhoods???

If you write like this, your grader will actually get visibly upset and might even question their role in the universe itself, like what poor life choices did they make to end up with such bogus writing in front of them?

If you are a chronic BSer in your English classes, don’t even think about taking the exam until you kick the habit (or at least take an oath to kick the habit – this is commendable too).

No time to write good copies

Last of all, you can say goodbye to the luxury of the rough copy-good copy process that students often get in their English classes. This is where basically you get some time to write a rough copy of an essay, you give it to your teacher or a fellow student for an edit, you get the edited essay back and make some corrections and voila, you’ve got your good copy. The AP English Language and Composition exam is rough draft only! So you’ll have to write a good rough draft. It will need to be composed, well-written, fully argumentative, and brimming with potential.

So yes, on the one hand, this is tough to do. On the other, it does give you some allowance – the graders know you are writing a rough draft and will grade your essay according. A couple grammar or spelling mistakes or a one-off awkward sentence won’t really bring your score down. A big flaw in logic or a lack of argumentativeness, however, could be your downfall. So this goes back to the writing stamina issue – get a lot of writing practice in and get good at writing. Keep practicing until your rough drafts are good enough to stand on their own. Do not write sketchy rough drafts any more!

From what I’ve seen as an AP English Language and Composition teacher, these four reasons are what make the exam so difficult. Many students get this misconception that English is easy (due to lower standards in their regular English class), or that essays can be BSed, and these misconceptions often lead to their downfall. Get your practice in and increase both the amount you read and the difficulty level of your readings (and also, get a good AP Language teacher), and you may have a shot at a level four or five.

The post How Hard is the AP English Language Exam? appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

4/5
A few questionable design choices holds Metal Gear Solid V back from being a stellar experience.

I never would have thought that one day I’d complain about the lack of story in a Metal Gear game. But an achingly spare narrative along with tedious progression mechanics prevents Metal Gear Solid V from being the near-perfect game it could have been.

Don’t get me wrong – the stealth action is some of the best you can find in any video game. The inclusion of large, traversable conflict zones, a marking system, a buddy system and dynamic enemy AI are all welcome additions to what will likely be Hideo Kojima’s last Metal Gear game. I was offered many creative problem solving opportunities that kept me engaged in the game, from planning my infiltration, to adapting to unforeseen guard responses on the fly, to sneaking away from danger when things got too hairy. My excitement piqued in the early stages of the game when I was confronted by a world of opportunity as well as some gripping cinematography and storytelling. But by the time I was in the mid to late game, my feelings were very different. Tedium, repetition, and lack of narrative left me feeling disappointed in the lead-up to the ending.

The Phantom Pain takes place after the events of Ground Zeroes. You are Big Boss, legendary super soldier of the Metal Gear world. The year is 1984 and you’ve just awoken from a nine-year coma after an attack that destroyed your private army, lost you an arm and left you with permanent shrapnel in your skull. The game begins with an impressive display of storytelling that blurs the line between what is imagined and what is real. And the prologue of Metal Gear Solid V is more than an exposé of common coma after-effects. Anyone who remembers the trailer from VGA 2012 knows what to expect: an extended allusion to the great American epic revenge tale, Moby Dick. Kojima succeeds in cross-referencing the tale of Captain Ahab with Big Boss’s own quest, without forcing it on his audience in large dumps of information or hiding its impact under a fleeting, cute remark. The Prologue of Metal Gear Solid V offers surprisingly good storytelling for a video game. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.

We know Kojima is a troll. Once famous for creating convoluted messes of stories (which were at least always charming at their core), he has now chosen to withhold many of those much-desired story beats from his audience. Live action codec transmissions have been replaced with pre-recorded cassette tapes, twenty-minute cut-scenes have been trimmed down to two. And remember those info dumps about The Patriots, the ones with graphs and long history lessons? Well, they’re gone. I was hoping to at least hear some great voice work from Keifer Sutherland. Yes, you’ll get a lot of him in the prologue, but not much after that. Forget about the David Hayter dilemma, the real Metal Gear voice actor controversy is about how the new high-budget Hollywood voice actor is a near-mute for most of the game. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Keifer Sutherland’s talent has been stifled.

I should be clear: this is not a critique of spare storytelling. It is a critique of Metal Gear Solid V’s inability to successfully employ spare storytelling. The frugal narrative style is as legitimate a style as any, and I for one was glad that Kojima tried something new to keep the franchise fresh. But far too much is left in the air. I was puzzled rather than mystified, and left wanting to know more about why characters behaved the way they did and what forces were really at work in the world. And no, it didn’t “all make sense in the end.” Somewhere underneath Kojima’s shell of a narrative there are complex themes begging to be explored. Big Boss is well known as the arch-villain of the Metal Gear universe. Metal Gear Solid V is a story of revenge and the making of a villain, which leaves plenty of room for complex characters and ambiguities between good and evil. Kojima also takes the concept of war into much darker territories than what one might expect from a video game. He explores issues such as torture, child soldier enlistment, massacre and PTSD, all without casting value statements on the subject matter, which is commendably artistic of him. But the story lacks a clear sense of direction and the ending is unsatisfying, not because it’s happy or sad, but because it doesn’t resolve or thoughtfully develop the storylines of the game’s characters. Spare storytelling can be a great way to express much with little. And Metal Gear Solid V is not a game without gravitas. It takes a serious balancing act to keep the player involved while revealing as little story as possible, and Kojima has tipped the scale too far in one direction.

As serious as the subject matter is, Metal Gear Solid V is not without the quirk the series has come to be known for. Carboard boxes are still in the game. In fact, they’ve been revolutionized. Now you can stand up and run in the box. You can lie down in the box. You can pop out of the box and shoot enemy guards. You can even apply decals of busty babes and Soviet soldiers to your cardboard box for added customization. You can hide in porta potties. You can employ a horse as your battlefield “Buddy” and make it poop on the road before enemy convoys arrive. You can collect posters for your cardboard boxes. You can track down the greatest hits of the ‘80s by collecting cassette tapes scattered across the two open-world regions. I appreciated this last feature. There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as sneaking into a Red Army base in Afghanistan for the sole purpose of stealing the Kids in America cassette tape that’s blasting from a boombox next to some radio communications equipment.

The main story missions in the game are distinct and memorable. You’ll be tasked with tracking targets, gathering intel, assassinating (or extracting) people, rescuing prisoners and stealing enemy assets in order to gain the upper hand against Cipher, the faction that sent you into a coma nine years prior. The missions feel organic and subject to the whims of the open world. There was one mission, for example, which required me to tail a high-ranking official en route to meet an arm’s dealer. My objective was to eliminate the arm’s dealer. It was also, however, the first time I had decided to equip some C4. Naturally I felt inclined to use it right away so I placed it along the road that my intel team had marked on my map. When the official and his armored entourage showed up I detonated the C4 and killed them all. Instead of encountering a Mission Failed screen, my intel team informed me that the arms dealer had changed his plans for the night upon learning about the official’s untimely demise. I ended up tracking him down in some far-off area of the map. This is the kind of dynamic gameplay that leaves you feeling satisfied with your manipulation of the environment. As with any open world game, there are also side missions that may or not capture your interest. Although they are usually not story-driven, the side missions offer fun tactical challenges often with as much dynamism as the main story missions. And, of course, there are always those posters and cassette tapes to collect.

The open world treatment is just what Metal Gear needed. Players can sneak behind enemy lines in Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border region. Both locations offer different terrain and weather that affects how players might approach the game. Soviet-occupied Afghanistan is quite literally a sandbox of mountains and deserts, forcing players to consider elevation, impassable terrain and sandstorms into their tactical decisions. It’s exciting when a sandstorm strikes and you’re faced with the decision of using the cover of the storm to make a mad dash for your target or to lay back and wait it out lest you get lost in the blowing sand or spotted by guards when the dust settles. Zaire’s jungle-oriented landscape offers rainfall that muffles footsteps, trees that provide cover and marshes for laying prone to track enemy movements. While I can’t help but feel that Zaire isn’t quite as immersive as Afghanistan (the beautiful tessellation and shading on those cliffs gets me every time), it’s nice that Kojima’s team reapplied the same kind of global scale that made Metal Gear Solid 4 such a diverse game. Both Afghanistan and Zaire offer welcome variations between the wilderness sneaking of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the urban stealth of Metal Gear Solid 4, while also including various pieces of history that will appeal to those who wish to understand more about the conflicts in those regions.

The crux of Metal Gear Solid’s stealth system hasn’t changed much over the years. There are still modes of varying escalation that determine how enemy guards will behave towards you. They might enter caution mode if they’re suspicious of your presence in the area. If they find you, they’ll go on high alert to flush you out. Evading them once caught isn’t as simple as running for the hills. Guards will use lights and mortars to flush you out of the surrounding countryside. If you can hide successfully while the guards are in alert mode, they’ll de-escalate into a search and destroy mode by performing sweeps of the area, particularly in your last known position. Not only is this type of AI behaviour smart and realistic, it also creates interesting tactical opportunities that allow you to bait guards into swarming towards one location so that you can access other locations without the overbearing security presence. But be careful not to abuse one method of engagement or the enemy AI will adapt. If you use your tranquilizer gun too often, for example, guards will wear armor and visors that make them impermeable to darts. In short, Metal Gear Solid V has successfully used the open world format to add depth to the engagement between player and AI.

Then there are the progression mechanics. In a world where every game wants to be an RPG, Metal Gear Solid V would have done best to resist the temptation. In order to compete with Cipher, you need to build up Mother Base, a large offshore facility that serves as home for you and your soldiers. In order to do this, you collect GMP by completing missions and collecting resources in the game world. You also need to recruit soldiers to work for you. This is where the Fulton Recovery System comes in.

The fulton recovery system is fast, efficient and funny. You whip an air balloon out of your back pocket, attach it to an item or an unconscious soldier, then watch them launch up into the air, the beginning of their long flight back to Mother Base. It feels great to hunt for high-ranking soldiers in-between and during missions. Yes, you’re basically kidnapping enemy soldiers and forcing them to change sides so they can fight for you. But it provides an incentive for players to employ non-lethal combat strategies, which are much more fun and rewarding than going in guns blazing.

Once you acquire these soldiers, they are divided into several categories (R&D, Support, Intel, etc.) based on their skill levels. The ranking of these different categories, along with the resources you collect on the battlefield, determine which weapons and items you can unlock. You can then Fulton these weapons and items to your location as a kind of express delivery service, letting you adapt to different combat situations with ease.

On paper, the weapon and item upgrade system works. The idea is that you can choose whichever items you wish to invest in without breaking the game by becoming too powerful. It also helps inspire a sense of creativity in problem-solving. Tranq darts are bouncing off the guards’ shields and visors? Well I can research this thing called a “Decoy” which might distract them, allowing me to come up from behind and choke them out. Or maybe I should get the sonar feature for my mechanical arm. It might help me see the guards better so I can slip past without having to deal with them at all.

And so on and so forth. There are many options for strategy that keeps the game interesting and adds to its replay value. But there is at least one particuarly annoying pitfall about the upgrade ladder design in Metal Gear Solid V that can rear its ugly head if you chose to ignore the progression mechanics (and they are easy to ignore).

This happened to me at one point when I was facing The Parasite Unit, a quartet of superhuman soldiers who can zip around the battlefield with great speed. Few things are more adrenaline-killing than realizing mid-boss battle that you never bothered to upgrade your rocket launcher and you need the upgrades for this fight. So you now have to spend 20 minutes reshuffling your employees into different categories that will give you the R&D level you need to build the rocket launcher. But wait, you will probably need to buy two rocket launcher upgrades. This boss is especially tough (there are four of them and only one of you, after all). Each launcher takes twenty-two minutes to research, and you’re not exactly sure if you have enough resources or staff to research the second launcher. You call your chopper to pick you up and fly you to another conflict region, so you can continue “grinding” (as they say in the RPG world) for more resources and manpower. Nevermind The Parasite Unit, you told them you’d be right back. They understand.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of the upgrade system in Metal Gear Solid V. There aren’t many prompts that force you to keep upgrading so you can avoid these types of situations. Something in the vein of “you can’t play this mission until you’re at this development level” would go a long way in saving the player the annoyance of having to put the real game on pause in order to play the staff management simulator that exists as the awkward underlying structure of the game. Call it handholding if you want, but without the right guidance from the game, it’s easy to let these kinds of management mechanics vanish into the background. But even if the game succeeded in helping me avoid such a situation, the RPG elements of Metal Gear Solid V felt far too out of place to give me any real sense of satisfaction from progression. I found the upgrade ladder, staff management and all other base-building mechanics to be the most boring part the game. It’s true that whatever you invest in your base can be used online in Metal Gear Solid V’s Forward Operating Base mode, so there’s that. You can pit yourself against players around the world in a game of attacking and defending. There’s a surprising amount of depth and customization involved, but the more advanced features of this mode are behind a paywall, which makes the whole thing feel exploitative. I imagine few people would buy Metal Gear Solid V solely for its multiplayer. Single Player is, of course, the game’s stronger suit and the bottom line is that it’s fun to use air balloons to steal containers and kidnap sleeping soldiers. But it’s not very fun to manage them all afterwards.

Tedium rises to high levels later in the game, not just from managing Mother Base, but from the repeat missions you are forced to play in order to unlock the grand finale. Here the story is as spare as ever and the only incentive that keeps you going is some vague hope that eventually a cut scene will play that will tie up all the loose threads. You have to spend hours on side missions and story missions you’ve already played in order for the “ending” to trickle through in pieces. It was very frustrating.

I have to admit that when the cutscenes do come, whether they are late in the game or earlier on, they are entertaining to watch. Kojima offers some dramatic cinematography and lighting, in the same impressive real-time rendering we’ve come to expect from the series. The game engine runs at 1080p and 60 frames per second without any hiccups, which makes for a very responsive stealth experience. And there is plenty of stealth to be had. It took me around 60 hours to beat Metal Gear Solid V, and there are dozens more hours for those who wish to play all the side missions and reach 100% completion. If only so many of those hours weren’t lost in tedium, I would have been much happier by the time I finished the game.

The post A Way-Too-Late Review of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain for PlayStation 4 appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

A fourteen-hour learning curve was all it took for me to figure out that I love Persona 4 Golden.

I’m someone who doesn’t really like numbers in video games. I don’t like it when weapons have stats. I’m not too huge on armor with HP bonuses. I don’t like XP. I don’t like unlockable guns, swords or laser sights. And I don’t like fighting the same opponents over and over again just to “level up”. This is why I keep away from most role-playing games.

But there have been exceptions in my life. Pokémon Yellow, for example. This was the only Japanese role-playing game I ever bothered to finish, mainly because it was the late 1990s and I was a Pokémon mega fan. Also, I didn’t realize that it was a JRPG. For nine-year-old me, it was just a way of simulating Ash Ketchum’s adventures on my Gameboy Color.

Flash forward several handheld generations later. It’s 2013 and I’ve just bought a PlayStation Vita. I’m late to the party and I need to find out what the Vita community thinks is the best game on the platform. I go to the internet. One game keeps sweeping headlines, a title I’m only vaguely familiar with. Forumites and Amazon user reviewers ascribe monumental qualities to this game, citing it as PlayStation’s answer to Pokémon and the lone justification for purchasing a PS Vita.

I never thought I could feel so involved with characters in a video game.

Make no mistake, I’ve never had buyer’s remorse after purchasing my Vita. I was just baffled by the unanimous praise that Persona 4 Golden enjoyed. Yes, it was a Vita exclusive, but it was also a remake of a PlayStation 2 game – not exactly flagship material for a newer platform. But forget about surprise. Fear is what I was really feeling. I knew that, as a fan and supporter of the Vita, I would have no choice but to play this outwardly stereotypical JRPG. This was scary to me. I like real-time combat in video games. I’m even happy to play RPGs as long as they fulfill this requirement. But turn-based Japanese role-playing games? I wasn’t sure if I could deal with far-fetched anime storylines and weird hair that defied the laws of physics.

And grinding. What’s so great about grinding? You run back and forth in a dungeon fighting the same opponents over and over again in order to increase your stats and prepare yourself for high level opponents and bosses. In a world of short attention spans, the logic behind grinding seems crazy. Why fight the same monsters you’ve already fought? Why keep playing in the same environment? It’s like the developers are putting the story and the exploratory features of the game on pause to force the player to undergo a series of mindless repetitions. And for some reason we are okay with this.

But there were things I was aware of at the back of my mind. Were my assumptions about JRPGs based on unfair snap judgements? Yes. Did I make fun of my friends who favored Final Fantasy over Metal Gear Solid? Yes. Have I ever given a conventional JRPG (with all the typical tropes, story beats and progression mechanics) an honest shot? No. I realized I had no real excuse to avoid Persona 4 Golden. I decided it was time to change my ways.

And boy what a change it was. That psychedelic intro. The hearts, the stars, the flowers, the colors. So many things I don’t understand. Igor? Margaret? Velvet Room? How are they connected to the TV world? Why is there a TV world? And how come the only inhabitant of the TV world is a giant cartoon bear named Teddy? And why does my orange-haired, headphone-wearing friend give him such a hard time? Why is my asshole homeroom teacher so concerned about the chastity of his students? To top it all off, after every narrative jump the story seemed to say, “hey don’t forget someone’s been killed, so this is actually a murder mystery game.”

What is this game?

Persona 4 takes its sweet time to introduce you to Inaba, the small town that features as the game’s setting. You take on the role of a soundless, grey-haired protagonist (this is more or less the game’s way of allowing you to project yourself onto the main character). In a nutshell, the game is part dungeon crawler, part high school simulator, part murder mystery. You make friends and maintain relationships. People get kidnapped and you travel into TVs (with your friends) to find and rescue them. Inside the TV world there are “shadows,” weird creatures of all stripes that represent the negative emotions of human beings. Shadows can

Umm… hasn’t there been a murder?

be anything from knights in shining armor to floating pairs of lips with massive tongues. You fight them with collectible “personas,” which are basically other creature-type things that you collect and fuse together to form… more creature-type things. Think of personas as another kind of shadow, except they represent the tamed and controlled emotions of human beings, channeled into some kind of benevolent resolve towards self-realization.

The most powerful shadows are the victims of the kidnappings. They figure as the end boss of each dungeon. The dungeons, I should add, are representations of their inner-most desires and anxieties, ranging from steamy bath houses to celestial kingdoms. The kidnapping victims are shadows because they refuse to accept hidden and embarrassing aspects of their true selves. Once defeated, they realize they should accept themselves for who they are. When this happens, they unlock their persona and join your team of mystery solvers/shadow fighters. Also, there’s a floating limousine in space that you can go to whenever you want to fuse or trade your personas and items. It’s called “The Velvet Room.”  

None of this made sense to me. The game stumbled along the border of fantasy and realism, discarding, for the most part, a core set of rules about how the world promised to function. That, and I just didn’t understand personas. If they are supposed to reflect a person’s resolve to be true to themselves, then why are they also an item drop that I can sometimes recover after beating a shadow?

Friendship-Based Gameplay

I couldn’t help but feel that Atlus, the development team behind Persona 4 Golden, had injected too much weirdness into the “monsters” of their universe. Then again, my only thorough experience with JRPG monsters comes from Pokémon – which are basically just animals who fight for you and say their own name. I soon learned that the persona system in Persona 4 Golden was probably for the best. As it turned out, the persona system was interesting, weird and endearing enough to keep me involved. Personas are separated into different classes called “arcana.” Each arcana is directly connected to individual characters (or a group of characters) in the game. If your relationships with these characters are strong, you will gain the ability to receive experience bonuses when you fuse personas that correspond to their arcana. This is doubly important for your core group of friends, the ones who follow you into the TV world. The stronger your relationship with them, the greater the power of their personas and the more likely they are to perform team work-related actions while in battle.

I learned that In the Persona series, your relationships are called “social links.” It’s important to maintain your social links in order to grant your personas extra skills and abilities. For this reason, my time in the game was divided between levelling up my personas in the TV world and levelling up my social links in Inaba. How do you level up your social links? Well, how do you get to know your friends in real life? You chill together, you go shopping together, you eat lunch together, you go on beach trips and so on and so forth.

When you’re hanging out with your friends, is it supposed to feel like you’re grinding in order to level up? No! It should feel like you’re having a good time with your friends. And I was very happy to see that this was exactly how I felt while working on my social links in Persona 4 Golden. Never before have I grown so attached to so many NPCs in a single game. Each time you level up a social link you are advancing the story between yourself and a specific character. By tying RPG progression mechanics so closely with actual storytelling, Persona 4 succeeded in keeping me, a grumpy anti-JRPGer, obsessively managing my social links and plotting how best to spend my time with a large network of friends. And it’s not as though you have all the time in the world to hang with your NPC friends. Each day you have to choose between fighting shadows in the TV world, participating in after-school extracurriculars, doing your homework, spending time with your little cousin, your uncle, your fellow townspeople, your classmates and more. It’s a delicate balancing act that forces you to strategize how best to spend your time and who best to spend it with. The sense of urgency that confronted me each day kept me involved in the game and made each of my decisions deliberate.

Persona 4 Golden made me realize that maybe high school wasn’t so bad after all.

The dynamics between RPG mechanics and storytelling made for another kind of challenge, one that is far more unconventional in video games with complicated gameplay systems. The question was this: should I follow the stats of the game and pursue social links based on improving the fuseability of my persona classes? Or should I forget about the persona classes and follow my heart (to borrow the endearing terminology of the Persona series) by spending time with the characters in the game who I believe deserve the most attention from me, based on the interest I have in their lives? It was like I was stuck in a tug-of-war between conventional RPG mechanics and storytelling. Whether this was Atlus’ intention or not, it was one of my favourite aspects about the game and likely one of the reasons why I vowed to see the game through to the end.

The Story: Unbelievable but Endearing

To an outsider of JRPGs like me, Persona 4 was bizarre at first. The game was essentially an interactive story about the struggles of each character’s journey towards self-realization and friendship. I wont pretend to understand the lore of the TV world or the velvet room. Nor do I understand the link between specific characters and their arcanas. And call me a bad gamer, but I never could get to the bottom of shadows and personas. What are they, really?

It wasn’t long before I realized that these issues were irrelevant. At the heart of Persona 4, I found a diverse crew of characters faced with dilemmas that were both intriguing and worthy of my sympathy. Believable is not quite the right word to describe these characters. There is something farfetched about just how different they all are from one another and how easy it can sometimes be to get them to reveal the things that trouble them most. Plus, they fit easily into common archetypes. The martial arts loving tomboy. The tough guy who hides his soft side. The seductive high school teacher. Then again, it’s clear that realism is not something that Atlus was after when they were designing this game.

Persona 4 Golden hosts a diverse crew of characters who will actually make you treasure your friendships in real life, as unabashedly cheesy as that sounds.

Sympathy for the characters is what it boiled down to. They struggled to reconcile who they were on the inside with how others perceived them. Their problems and ruminations weren’t particularly complex, but they were always deep and heartfelt. Each character succeeded in gaining my interest and my actual commitment to be their friend.  I’m not talking about the grey-haired player character that I’m controlling. I’m talking about me, the guy holding the Vita and staring into the screen. If this were a Fallout game, I wouldn’t hesitate to attack a friendly NPC every now and then because who cares it’s a video game and I want to be an idiot. But I could never imagine doing something like this in Persona 4 Golden. I actually care about the characters! This isn’t me being a waifu enthusiast. There’s just something impressive about how so many wildly different characters can succeed in gaining my interest and my sympathy, all from a single video game.

Empathy from a Video Game?

When Persona 4 Golden actually made me wish I had done more work in my high school years to build and maintain my real life social links, that was when I knew the developers at Atlus had succeeded in doing what I’ve always believed to be near-impossible in a big budget video game: making the player feel empathy. Plenty of video games offer me the feeling of sympathy (empathy’s lightweight cousin). Yes, I can agree with the feelings of characters in a game. I can agree with the Fallout 4 player character’s sadness over losing his (my?) son, I can agree with Nathan Drake’s mission to rescue Sully (knowing full well that Nathan Drake is sort of a mass murderer) and I can even agree with Big Boss’s lust for revenge, despite having the foresight to know that he will turn into a bad guy later in Metal Gear Solid’s chronological timeline. Sympathy is easy to feel. But not empathy. Empathy goes beyond merely sharing feelings with another. To empathize with someone is to understand their feelings and to feel their feelings for yourself. In a nutshell, it is to genuinely put yourself in their shoes.

To give you some perspective, allow me to playback the examples of Fallout 4, Uncharted and Metal Gear Solid 5. Yes I feel sorry for this guy in the wasteland who lost his son. But I’m not feeling what he’s supposedly feeling. I don’t feel the sense of loss that the writers tried to write into the story. I knew my son for a couple of minutes during an intro sequence that I knew was just a neat little gimmick to set the grounds for me to make my own character. Great. Now that that’s done, I’m much more interested in checking out the post-Armageddon world and doing some side quests along the way.

The player dialogue options in the game ranges from the super-serious to the ultra-comical. The social link system forces you to think twice before saying something stupid just for kicks.

And yeah, Nathan Drake is concerned about Sully. Good for him for deciding to rescue his friend. But I don’t feel the urgency of knowing a close friend is in danger. I’m just going to shoot these dudes in this temple and climb some shit and maybe go on a high speed chase until I reach my objective.

Lastly, there’s Metal Gear Solid 5. Skull Face is an asshole and Big Boss deserves to get even with him. But the truth is I am way more interested in sneaking my way across Afghanistan and kidnapping high ranking soldiers than I am in making Skull Face suffer.

These are a few examples of how video games attempt to make you empathize with characters via gameplay, but fall way short. By kidnapping soldiers and disrupting Cipher’s operations in Afghanistan, you are supposedly putting yourself in Big Boss’s revenge-laden shoes. But the gameplay is far too removed from the story to truly make me feel this way. Uncharted uses cinema style transitions and pacing to keep me involved in the game, but it is awe and adrenaline that I feel when rescuing Sully – not an empathetic desire to save my friend from danger. Fallout 4 is the worst offender of the three. Here I am creating a character in my own likeness that I am supposed to be able to understand and identify with more than these other non-RPG games. Then my son gets taken away and I think “Yeah, okay, sure. Can I get out of the vault now? I want to fight a super mutant and steal a leather jacket.”

Persona 4 Golden’s attempt at empathy is far more successful. The social link mechanic keeps me directly involved in the narrative development of multiple characters. And even if I choose to follow strategic logic when increasing my persona fusion stats and party rankings, I am forced to do so through the game’s insistence on friendship-based gameplay. I am hearing about my drama club classmate’s hospitalized dad because it will increase my ability to fuse personas of the Sun arcana. I have no choice but to go along with following her story if I want to do well in the game. It’s not about numbers and increasing my stats. It’s about learning how she’s an aspiring actor, it’s about gaining her friendship and learning that there’s something serious that troubles her, and it’s about being held in a state of suspense as you seek to uncover just what it is that causes her anxiety.  The stories are interesting and succeed in pulling on your heart strings and reminding you of the angst of teenage life. Most important of all, they are tied to the game’s progression mechanics. If gameplay is the number one factor that keeps a player involved in a game, then it’s actually not very surprising that Persona 4 Golden’s story-based gameplay offers the same kind of empathetic understanding one gets when reading a novel by a favourite author. By the time the game was over, I was left in a state of sadness and bewilderment that I hadn’t felt since beating games as an 11-year-old and wishing that they hadn’t ended. That, or I just couldn’t cope with the fact that out of several narrative pathways I had somehow gotten the infamous bad ending of Persona 4 Golden.

Few games offer this level of story involvement, which is why I was able to overlook Persona 4’s JRPGness and enjoy it for its story and it’s ability to present characters who I can truly empathize with. I should point out that there’s nothing wrong with JRPGs – I’m just someone who’s not too hot on sinking 80 hours into a game without getting a decent and involving story out of it (call me crazy). This is why I am hyped for Persona 5. Sure, there will be levelling up and grinding and turn-based combat (the horror). But if Atlus’s last release in the series is an indication of what their next game will be, then grinding will be more like storytelling. And levelling up will be more than an increase in stats and numbers; it will be an increase in my involvement in the story and my empathy towards the characters. Plus I survived years of turn-based combat in my Pokémon Yellow runs. It can’t be all that bad.

The post Why I like Persona Even Though I don’t like RPGs appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

So you’re one of the few folks who bought Sony’s neglected portable gaming console. You must love your handheld, especially if you’re the owner of one of the so-called legacy models, which sport higher quality OLED screens than their slimmer counterparts. As cool as we are for liking electronics that are somehow both retro and more gorgeous, we do face one pitfall: our Vitas are susceptible to a low battery indicator glitch.

Owners of the PS Vita 1000 series can expect to encounter a problem with their battery gauge that causes the system to shut down at half charge or even full charge.

You have two options.

• Send your Vita to Sony. Be prepared to spend an exorbitant amount of money. You’ll also lose your Vita for several weeks.
• Do it yourself. You’ll spend $10 or less and be back to playing games after 20-30 minutes of work.

This is an example of how DIY projects are not always just a fun challenge or a test of wits. In this case, it is more cost effective and time effective to fix the Vita yourself. That said, you will have to open the Vita and lay bare its electronic innards. More specifically, you’ll have to pry open the back plate, disconnect the battery from the motherboard, let it sit, reconnect, and then put it all back together.

Don’t worry – you can do this. It’s easier than it sounds.

What you need:

• Small Phillips screwdriver (#00).
• Plastic smartphone spudger.

A note on electrostatic discharge:  You shouldn’t have to worry too much about electrostatic discharge since 1) you’ll only be unplugging a wire and 2) you’ll be using a spudger. However, it’s best to err on the side of caution. Keep yourself grounded by continually touching metal portions of the Vita case. You’ll be doing this regardless as part of the DIY process, so just make sure you’re not going out of your way to build up a static charge. Don’t dash your socks across the carpet and don’t wear woolen sweaters to pet your cat. You can do these things when the job is done.

Let’s begin.

 Step 1) Power down.
Shut down your Vita and remove your game cartridge.

Step 2) Remove the screws.
There are four screws on the back plate, two screws on the bottom near the charging port and two screws under the lid of the mystery port. Be careful not to lose them during removal. Keep them somewhere safe.

Step 3) Pry open the back plate.
This will be the most time consuming task. Be patient and don’t get rough. You’re going to be sticking the spudger between the silver rim and the back plate.
There are several clips inside the Vita that you will have to pop open. I found that the best place to start was on the left and right sides, along the rounded edges. The plastic spudger isn’t the most powerful tool, but it’s the best way to avoid scratching your Vita. Trust me, you don’t want to take a chance with a metal spudger. The Vita is too beautiful to be nicked and scuffed. If you need more leveraging power, you can grip the grooves on the four corners. The key is to be patient and to work your way around, section by section.

Step 4) Unplug the battery from the motherboard.
Separate the back plate from the main body of the PS Vita. You’ll have to be gentle, because the back plate will remain linked to the main body due to the battery wire and the rear touchpad wire.  Keep the Vita face down and place an object behind it so that the back plate has something to rest against – otherwise you’ll be placing unnecessary stress on the battery connector and the rear touchpad connector. The battery, as you’ll see in Figure 6, is located on the back plate and attached to the motherboard via a three prong socket. Use the pointy end of your spudger to push the battery connector out of the socket. Once removed, leave the battery unconnected for a couple of minutes just to be sure that the Vita’s internal sensors have a chance to reset.

Step 5) Put it all back together.
Line up the battery wire into the socket and use the spudger to push the connector back into place. Be sure not to use excessive force. The battery connector doesn’t exactly snap in, so don’t push it any further once it stops sliding into the socket. Double check that the rear touchpad wire is securely fastened to the motherboard (it may have come loose). I found that it was best to begin snapping the back plate into the main body by starting from the side that houses the charging port and the headphone jack. Once your Vita is sealed, power it back on. Make sure that everything is working. This is just a precaution – if you’ve been gentle throughout the DIY process, you don’t need to worry about anything going wrong. If your Vita doesn’t power on or if the touch functions or other buttons aren’t working, it means you have a loose connection. Re-open the Vita and recheck all the connectors. When you’re done testing, put the screws back in (remember that the silver screws go on the top and bottom and the black screws go on the back plate).

And that’s it – you’re done! We’ve basically performed a hard reset of the battery sensor. Your PS Vita is once again the premium portable console it was designed to be.

The post How to Fix the Low Battery Glitch on a PlayStation Vita appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

You shouldn’t have to spend a fortune to mack out your ride. There are people out there who need to love their car on a budget. Those who are money conscious will be happy to know that you can give your car some style without flashing the big bucks. And I’m not taking about racing stripes or bumper stickers. I’m talking rims.

As an obnoxious blaster of music from the suburbs of Toronto, I’ve heard lyrics about spinnas, twenty-fours, Dayton spokes and several other forms of flashy wheel ornamentation. Is this why I wanted to deck out the rims of my first car? I don’t know. Maybe. What I do know is that something had to be done about my fifteen-year-old rims.

So I went to the internet. There is a tonne of YouTube content out there about how to paint your own rims. I wasted a lot of time slogging through hours of unedited video in order to learn about painting and auto restoration. But even that wasn’t enough to prevent me from making mistakes when I whipped out the spray cans. So I’m writing everything I’ve learned, whether it was from the web or from getting my hands dirty, into a guide that’s way easier to navigate than a video. I will admit, however, that sometimes those videos were lengthy for the right reasons. It turns out painting your own rims (the right way) is an intricate process. So this guide is a little on the long side. But that shouldn’t deter you. Just scroll through to read what you want to read, or hit Ctrl F. Also, bear in mind that I’m no expert. Everything I’ve written here is based on my first-time experience of painting my rims. Just think of me as a cave-dwelling, YouTube-hating geezer who believes that some things are best left to the written word.

A note on puttin’ in work:
Before we get down to business, I must warn you: rim restoration is a lot of work. But it’s worth it. Sure you can go to a shop and have someone else powder coat your rims, but be ready to spend anywhere between five hundred to a thousand dollars. With prices that high, you may as well just buy a whole new set of rims. This is why DIY makes much more sense. If you put in the work and do a good job, you’ll save hundreds of dollars while imbuing your rims with the same long lasting quality you’d expect from a shop. You’ll also learn a thing or two about painting and achieve mad gains for your forearms (you’ll understand in a moment). Nothing beats the satisfaction of getting the job done with your own two hands.

Let’s begin.

What you need:

1) A roll of painters tape. $3

2) Index cards. $2

3) Newspapers. $0

4) Sandpaper. $20
A lot of people think painting is about the paint. This is an honest and totally understandable assumption. But really, the majority of the work in painting projects come from priming. This is especially true when it comes to rims. Depending on how worn they are, be prepared to spend a lot of time sanding your rims down to a smooth finish.

I bought the following grit levels: 220, 400, 800, 1000. They each came in a package of 5 sheets (9” by 11”).

A note on buffing machines:
Some of you may be thinking “Hey, I’ve got a machine that can sand for me. Why should I buy paper?” Well, yes, you can use the machine on any flat, outward facing surface. But since when have rims been solid cylindrical blocks? These are modern automobiles, not Sumerian push-carts. You’re going to have get in-between the spokes and into every little nook and cranny. This is where paper rules.

5) Dishwashing Gloves. $2

6) Breathing protection. If you don’t have one of those cool gas masks, then a cloth mask will suffice. $10

7) Eye protection. You can get a decent pair of safety glasses for $10

8) Paint! You’ll need several cans of automotive spray paint. $100

2 cans of primer (227 g/8 oz each)*
3-4 cans of base coat (227 g/8 oz each)*
2 cans of high-heat clear coat (312 g/11 oz each)*

*These numbers are based on 15” rims with a five-spoke design. I had about a 1/3 can of each left to spare (which is handy for touch ups). You may need more depending on how big your rims are.
*Be sure to store your paint in an environment between 15-20 degrees Celsius.

Total estimated cost: $147

Before we get into the steps, ask yourself: are my rims mounted on the car? Or are they detached? It’s easier to work with tires that are in storage (like winter or summer tires in the off-season). If you live in warmer climes and only have one set of wheels, then you’re in for a bit of a quandary. You have three options the way I see it.

• Don’t drive your car for the duration of this project. This means you will have to leave it standing for at least two or three days (and that’s if you wake up early and work diligently).
• Call 3 friends over to help you out so you can get it done in one day.
• Complete the project over a week, or two weeks, or however long you want to push it. You’ll be driving around with scuffed rims and you’ll need to do a quick resanding of everything before you finally get to painting.

I was working on my summer rims during winter time, so I was lucky enough to have the freedom to move them around and to take my time. It took me about 2 months, in fact, because I was doing my Master’s and could only spare a couple of hours every week. And it certainly didn’t help that my rims were fifteen years old …

Step 1 – Clean your rims

Reel out your garden hose and wash them down. Pour on some soap and scrub vigorously with a brush. You will need a tough cleaning instrument, something hard and bristly, like a toilet bowl cleaner. You can even use a steel scrubber since you don’t need to worry about messing up your existing paint job. There will be a lot of road grime and brake dust, especially on the inside. If your wheels are detached, take this opportunity to flip them over and scrub out the innards.

A note on soap:
I used a “wheel degreaser” to clean my rims. It cost around $10-$12. Was this a good investment? Probably not. I have my doubts about just how necessary these cleaners are. Do you really need a separate soap just for your rims? I know rims are a big deal, but I’ve been fine just using traditional car wash soap. Either way, at this stage, feel free to throw whatever harsh cleaning chemicals you have at your rims. You’re going to be ripping up your existing paint job as part of the DIY process anyways. So don’t put as much time into thinking about which cleaner to use as I have put into this way-too-long and winding note on soap.

Step 2 – Let them dry

You can pass the time by cranking up the beats in your car speakers and dabbing on your driveway.

Step 3 – The sands of time

As someone who has painted a garage, a deck, car rims, soot-stained bedroom walls and a smoke-damaged stucco ceiling (my room survived a fire), I cannot stress enough the truth that prepping is the most important part of a painting project. The work you put in here will determine whether or not your paint job is successful in the long run. Sanding is highly repetitive and it will take a long time, but you will thank yourself when your rims are still gleaming after months and years have passed.

I mentioned grit levels earlier. The idea is to start with coarse sandpaper and work your way up to a smooth finish. This is represented by grit levels. The lower the grit level, the coarser the sandpaper.

Safety First
Before you begin, put on your glasses, put on your mask, put on your dishwashing gloves. Will you look dumb? Yes. But looking dumb is way more attractive than permanently damaging your lungs, eyes, and nails with the chemical cesspool that will be released into the air during the sanding process. Which reminds me, make sure you are working in a ventilated area. If you are not outside, then keep your garage door open.

Start with 220 grit. Tear off a piece no bigger than your own hand. Scrub vigorously over cracked, bumpy areas where heat and/or weather elements have broken apart the paint. I spent the longest amount of time with 220, probably because my rims were fifteen years old and heavily pitted. It may take several minutes to shave down one small, damaged area. Your rims may be different. Just be sure to use the coarseness of the 220 to level out the surface. Make sure you go over the less-damaged areas too. Get into every nook and cranny. If your rims are detached, be sure to rotate them to a comfortable angle. I sat on one chair and put the rim on another chair. I found this was the best option for my back. Take breaks if your forearms get tired. Don’t be discouraged while you are taking the break. Instead, feel proud that your forearms are getting jacked. Reposition your fingers along the sandpaper when you notice less friction during scrubbing. This is how you utilize the paper’s entire surface area. When your sandpaper loses its grit, discard it and rip out another piece.

If your rims are detached, take some time to flip them over and sand out the inside. You will find lots of gunk, but the surface is flat (albeit circular), so it will be much less of a hassle to sand. If your rims are designed so as to expose a large amount of the wheel well, then sanding out and painting the insides will go a long way in achieving a clean and polished look.

After you’ve sanded all four rims with the 220, repeat the process with the 400. Then repeat with 800, then 1000. It would be wise to wipe your rims with a damp cloth between each grit level. You’ll reduce the dust in your environment and you’ll accelerate the sanding process.

A note on boredom:
I thought of two things as I sat there sanding my rims. 1) Is it normal to care about rims this much? and 2) Should I multitask to keep myself entertained? I realized the answer to both questions is undoubtedly yes. So I brought my laptop outside and covered it in a clear bag (to keep it dust free). I streamed the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It was great having something to watch while I worked. You can watch something like I did or listen to music or a podcast. Sanding is monotonous. You won’t be using much brain power once you get the hang of it. Think of a way to keep yourself entertained and the experience will be much more pleasing. Otherwise you risk losing your sanity to the sands of time.

Step 4 – Clean your rims again

There will be a toxic medley of paint dust, brake dust, road tar shavings and various metal flakes all over your rims. Time to wash it away once and for all. Use water and soap. Give it a scrub to be sure that the paint you’ve sanded off is gone for good (sometimes it likes to reactivate when it’s wet). Just don’t kill yourself scrubbing. There’s no need to clean in beast mode like you did in Step 1. You’ve already gotten rid of most of the gunk and your forearms are probably tired from sanding.

Run a finger along your rims after you’ve finished cleaning. Is there a coloured residue on your skin? If yes, then you haven’t finished cleaning. Scrub again. For best results, use the “Jet” setting on your garden hose.

Step 5 – Let them dry again

You can pass the time by writing a love poem about the relationship between Man and machine or by doing the steering wheel swerve on your driveway (refer to the Ridin’ Rims music video).

Step 6 – Painting time

There they are lying on the asphalt, smooth bare-naked rims, waiting to be painted in loving strokes.

If this is the image that is going through your mind, it means you have completely lost it. Let’s finish this project so we can keep whatever sanity we have left.

Before you bust out the spray cans, take some time to consider your environment. You want a place devoid of dust, wind and sun, but you need enough ventilation to keep the air clean and breathable. I started painting on the floor in the garage, but soon realized that there was way too much dust. It was landing on my rims and sticking to the paint. So I moved them outside to the driveway. But it was far too sunny. I didn’t want my paint to haze over as it dried. So I moved to the side of my house. It was grassy but at least it was well ventilated and covered in shade. I placed a bunch of newspapers underneath the rims to save my grass from the over-spray. It went well, but I didn’t finish before nightfall. When I continued painting the next day, it was windy outside and there was a swarm of flies who sacrificed themselves to the alluring smell of my Gunmetal Metallic spray paint. I believe a few of them are still embedded in my rims, like prehistoric insects in amber. If my rims stand the test of time it will be cool to know that they’ll be valuable to paleontologists 20 million years from now.

Anyways, be sure to consider your environment. Don’t scramble from place to place like I did. Think it through and start early. The perfect environment would be an elevated table in a clean garage on a non-windy day.

A note on painting the inside of your rims:
If you’ve decided to go the DIY route, chances are that your rims are either old, the stock model, or both. If this is the case, you probably don’t need to paint the inside of your rims. But if you decide to go the extra mile, you need to consider how to prevent over-spray. Your best bet is flip your rims over so that they’re face down on the floor. Lay newspaper down flat on the inside of your rims. Seal the edges with painter’s tape so that nothing can drip down onto the forward facing part of your rims. Spray in very light strokes along the inside of the rims. The circular and vertical nature of the backside of your rims makes this area highly susceptible to running and unevenness. You may even want to stand the rim up and paint the bottom-most area section by section, rotating the wheel every few minutes as the paint dries. This strategy, however, will be very time consuming. Consider first whether or not it’s worth the extra trouble to paint the inside of your rims. When you’re done painting the insides you can start on the outsides. If all went well and there were no leaks, you can leave your taped-down newspaper as is in order to prevent over-spray from getting on the inside of your rims.

Throw some newspaper down all over your painting area. Lay your rims flat over the newspapers. Don’t stand your rims up, because that will cause the paint to run and blotch. Wipe a finger along the spokes one last time to make sure the surface is completely clean.

Get your cue cards. Place them along the edge of you rims, at the point where the tire rubber meets metal. This is to make sure the over-spray doesn’t get on your tires. If you think your cue cards will fall over, tape them together at the base so that they share their weight collectively.

Start with your primer. Depending on the instructions on your spray can, you will likely need to shake it for at least a minute before you begin. Spray in short bursts and light even strokes from a distance of about 8-10 inches. Do a thin and light coat the first time around. Don’t try to cover everything in one go. The very first coat should be like a dusting. Think of it as the first snowfall of the season, when those little chutes of grass are poking out through the snow. Only after three of these light coats should the surface be completely covered in primer.

Keep shaking the spray can between every few strokes. Shake it a lot. Shake it enough to reassign the simile of “shake it like a polaroid picture” to “shake it like an automotive spray can.” Trust me, you don’t want blobs of paint flying out onto your rims. If this happens, you’ll be tempted to wipe it with your hands. And if you wipe it with your hands, you’ll end up smudging your paint job. Keep shaking the can and you’ll avoid going down that road.

Remember to wait ten minutes between each coat. To save time, you don’t actually have to “wait.” As the paint on one rim is drying, you can move on to the next. By the time you’ve applied one coat to all four rims, you can move back to your first rim to apply the second coat, and so on and so forth.

Let your primer dry for one hour before applying the base coat (check the instructions on your spray can to confirm). You’re basically going to repeat what you did with the primer. This time around, however, you will likely need to give each rim four coats of paint. Otherwise, the same things apply. Keep your coats light and your cans shaking.

Does it look pretty yet? Because we’re about to increase the luster. Let your base coat dry for 30 minutes before applying the clear coat. Again, the same things apply. Clear coat is important because it adds a protective layer to your base coat. Be sure to use a “high heat” clear coat intended for rims. Trust me, they will need the extra protection. It takes a lot of courage to be a rim. They have to withstand scorching heat from the friction of your brakes, along with tar, brake dust, road debris and enough spinning to drive lesser men insane.

Let your rims sit for twenty-four hours before remounting and taking them for a spin. You can pass the time by sleeping or by considering a world devoid of Mankind’s incessant need to pimp his ride.

A note on caring for your newly painted rims:
Don’t bother using wheel degreasers or other such cleaners. They are highly abrasive and are known to cause damage to custom paint jobs. Just clean them with a sponge and regular car wash soap. If your base coat doesn’t contain any metal flakes, feel free to go at it with a clay bar and some polish every few seasons. If your rim has a centre cap which can only be removed with a lever or some other sort of tool, then be sure to cover said tool with a rag in order to prevent scuffing your rims. Last but not least, be careful when parallel parking. Do not scrape the curb!

A note on why this is the “right way”:
A lot of people don’t put enough effort into sanding. A lot of people just buy spray paint marketed as “wheel paint” to avoid the task of priming and clear coating. The reality is that you can use any automotive paint as your base coat, which means you shouldn’t limit yourself to the few colour choices under the moniker of “wheel paint.” I found the colour I liked by stumbling upon the paint codes of the First Generation Chevy Camaro. That was the only way I could find the perfect shade of Gunmetal.  Lastly, many people opt to paint their rims by plastidipping them. Plastidipping is convenient and I believe it has its uses, but it just doesn’t give you the same long lasting quality as a full fledged paint job. Only through sanding, priming, base coating and clear coating will your paint job last you several years.

Congratulations. You have successfully chick-magnetized your ride. This goes both ways. If you are a girl, then dudes will be impressed, probably more than if it were the other way around, to be quite honest. Take a look at your car when you drive by a highly reflective glass building. You will be surprised by how boss you look. Just don’t stare at your reflection for too long. Imagine explaining to the collision reporting centre that you crashed due to your vanity and your completely irrational love of rims.

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