What it all adds up to

Word	What it means
Topic	What a text is about, in a word or two: friendship, pride, change.
Theme	What a story suggests about life or people, written as a complete sentence.
Moral	A lesson stated as a rule — always, never, you should. Usually too simple to be a story's theme.
Purpose	Why the writer wrote it: to inform, persuade, entertain, explain or reflect.
Audience	The readers a text is written for.
Tone	The writer's or speaker's attitude towards the subject: admiring, amused, critical, bitter.
Mood	The feeling the text creates in the reader. Also called atmosphere.
Synthesize	To put information from several parts of a text together and reach a conclusion no single part states.

Priya refuses all help with her science fair project because she wants to prove she can do it alone. The night before the fair, her model collapses. Her younger brother, whom she has sent away all week, holds the pieces while the glue dries. At the fair, she lists him as her partner.

A model reading. Four answers to “What is the theme?”

• “Pride.” — a topic. It says nothing about pride.
• “Priya learns to accept help.” — a summary of one character. Close, but not general.
• “Never try to do things alone.” — a moral, and more than the story claims.
• “Refusing help can be a kind of pride, and accepting it takes its own strength.” — a theme: general, a full statement, and every event backs it up.

A test. Replace the character's name with “people”. If the sentence still makes sense and the whole story supports it, it is a theme.

Every September the lost-and-found fills with jackets that cost more than a month of bus passes. Every June the unclaimed ones go to a charity bin. Somewhere between those two dates, nobody looks. Label it. Check it. Or donate it on purpose.

• Purpose: to persuade. The last three short sentences are instructions.
• Audience: students and families at one school — the people who own the jackets.
• Tone: dryly critical. “Nobody looks” is blunt, and the repeated “Every September … Every June” makes the waste sound routine. Disapproving, but at the mild end: not angry.
• Mood is what you feel reading it — perhaps a little guilty. A different question from tone.

Cartoons are on the reading test too, and they usually need synthesis: the picture and the caption together make the point.

A cartoon shows a family at a dinner table, each face lit by a phone screen. Under the table the dog sits with its leash in its mouth, staring at the door. The caption reads: “Family time.”

A model reading. The caption says family time; the picture shows none. Put the screens, the waiting dog and the caption together, and the point is that screens pull attention away from whoever is right in front of us. Now test the options:

• “Dogs need to be walked every day.” — one detail.
• “Families should eat dinner together.” — they already are. It misses the screens.
• “Screens can take attention away from the people we are with.” — accounts for everything. The best answer.

Titles count. A title is the one line the writer placed above everything else. On a whole-passage question, reread it.

• A theme in one word, or a summary of one character.
• A moral the story does not support — always and never are warning signs.
• Confusing tone and mood. Writer's attitude, reader's feeling.
• The right tone family at the wrong strength. Critical is not scathing.
• On a whole-passage question, an option true of one paragraph only.