ACT Preparation / Unit 16 ACT 1534 review, 2 to 3 minutes
An Informational Passage: Humanities
The idea
A passage on a humanities topic often weighs interpretations: of a work of art, a performance or a tradition. Track whose view each sentence reports, the author's own or someone else's, because questions distinguish them. A claim the author reports is not a claim the author makes.
In practice
Worked passage, invented for the course, about an invented painter: "For twenty years, Elena Marsh painted inland farms in reds and golds. Then she moved to the coast, and for the rest of her career she painted almost nothing but gray water. Critics at the time called it a decline, a painter running out of color. I think they mistook restraint for loss. Look closely at the later canvases: the grays are warm in one corner and cold in another, and a single wave can hold a dozen of them. Marsh did not give up color. She learned how much one color could hold." Question one: what is the author's main claim? That Marsh's later gray paintings show refinement, not decline. Question two: how do the critics' view and the author's differ? The critics saw loss; the author sees restraint. A choice giving the critics' view as the author's misreads whose opinion it is. Question three: what does "a single wave can hold a dozen of them" do? It serves as evidence, pointing to the many grays within the later paintings.
Where people slip
Perspective is the trap in passages like this one. Mark reported views, such as "critics called it," separately from the author's own "I think." When a question asks what the author believes, only the author's sentences count. This completes the key-ideas unit; the next unit asks how a passage is built: its words, its structure and its point of view.
Your place on the trail
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