Tutor profile: Katie H.

If I'm going home to the West Coast for the holidays, what verb of motion would I use?

If you're going home to the West Coast, we'll assume you're probably taking an airplane. And if you're going home just for the holidays, then you plan on returning to school and making it a round trip overall. Therefore, you would have to use an indeterminate verb of motion, and if you're taking a round trip by plane, you would use летать!

How do I find a good balance between evidence and original thought in my essays?

The building block of high school essays are concrete-comment-comment chunks: if you want to strike a nice balance and flow in your paper, it's best to provide one piece of evidence from a primary source, followed by two pieces of your own commentary related to that evidence.

What's the difference between synecdoche and metonymy as literary devices?

Great question, that's a pretty common thing for students to mix up when they're studying for the AP Literature exam! Both of them are metaphorical, but metonymy is when something is used to refer to something related to it, like calling someone's car a "nice ride." A "ride" relates to a car, but isn't necessarily part of it, whereas with synecdoche you use a part of something to refer to the whole (like saying "mast" to refer to a whole ship, even though the mast is just a part of it.)