English 30-1 · Close reading
Reading closely
Part B of the diploma gives you texts you have never seen and 70 questions about them. That sounds impossible to study for, and it is not: the questions repeat the same handful of moves, and this page is those moves.
- 1. What it says, what it implies
- 2. Tone, mood and diction
- 3. Purpose, audience and structure
- 4. Point of view
- 5. Working a question
What it says, what it implies
The idea: an inference is a conclusion built from evidence on the page plus reasoning. If you cannot point at the words that support it, it is a guess.
Read: She set the letter on the table, unopened, and went back to washing dishes that were already clean.
| Stated | Implied |
|---|---|
| The letter is unopened | She is not ready to read it |
| The dishes are already clean | The washing is not about the dishes |
| She went back to washing | She wants an occupation that is not the letter |
Nothing in that passage says she is avoiding anything. Put the three details together and avoidance is the only reading that accounts for all of them — which is exactly what a diploma question means by suggests.
The words that tell you which kind of question it is
- States, identifies, according to the passage — the answer is on the page, in words. Go find it.
- Suggests, implies, conveys, reveals — an inference. The answer is not written; the evidence for it is.
- Primarily, mainly, best — more than one option is partly true. Choose the one that covers the most of the passage.
- Effect of, serves to, in order to — you are being asked about a choice the writer made and what it accomplishes.
Tone, mood and diction
The idea: tone is the writer's attitude; mood is the reader's feeling. Both are built out of word choice, and word choice is the evidence you quote.
| Term | Belongs to | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Tone | The writer or speaker | bitter, affectionate, detached, wry, reverent, defiant |
| Mood | The reader, created by the text | uneasy, hopeful, claustrophobic, melancholy |
| Diction | The words chosen | formal or colloquial, abstract or concrete, harsh or gentle |
| Connotation | What a word carries | thrifty and cheap describe the same behaviour and judge it differently |
A tone question is usually decided by two or three words. In another meeting, another hour of my life I will never see again — truly, we are blessed, the word blessed is doing the opposite of what it means, which makes the tone sarcastic rather than grateful.
Watch out: tone words in the options are often close together — critical, bitter, outraged. Pick the one whose intensity matches the passage. A mild complaint is not outrage, however negative it is.
Purpose, audience and structure
The idea: every text is trying to do something to someone. Naming what, and to whom, explains most of the choices in it.
- Purpose: to persuade, to inform, to entertain, to reflect, to provoke. Watch for a text that claims one and performs another.
- Audience: vocabulary, assumed knowledge and the amount explained all point at who the writer imagined reading.
- Structure: where a text begins and ends is a decision. An anecdote first, then an argument, makes the argument concrete; a question at the end leaves the work with the reader.
- Shifts: a change of tense, sentence length, tone or speaker marks a turn. Questions cluster around turns because that is where meaning changes.
Juxtaposition makes a point without stating it
The town rebuilt the bridge in a single season. The library has waited nine years.
Neither sentence criticizes anyone. Setting them side by side does, which is why an option like implies a judgment about the town's priorities beats describes two construction projects.
Point of view
The idea: who is telling the story controls what you are allowed to know — and whether you should trust it.
| Point of view | You get |
|---|---|
| First person (I) | One character's version, with their blind spots included |
| Second person (you) | The reader placed inside the situation; rare and deliberate |
| Third-person limited | One character's thoughts, told from outside |
| Third-person omniscient | Any character's thoughts, and the whole picture |
An unreliable narrator is one whose account the text quietly contradicts. When that happens, the gap between what is claimed and what is shown becomes the subject, and questions will ask you to read against the narrator rather than with them.
Working a question
The idea: the reading is done once. After that, every question is a matter of finding the evidence and eliminating options that the evidence does not support.
- Read the whole selection first, quickly, for what it is doing — not for detail. Detail is findable; shape is not.
- Read the question before the options and answer it in your head.
- Go back to the lines the question points at, plus the sentence either side.
- Eliminate: options that are true of life but not of this text; options that are true of one line but not the passage; options that overstate.
- Check the remaining answer against the evidence, and move on. The best answer is the most defensible one, not the most interesting.
Watch out: questions that link two selections ask what the two share or where they part. Answer those last, once each text is clear on its own.