American Literature / Unit 2 AML 0126 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Prose Passage in Six Moves
The idea
A prose passage under exam conditions takes six moves. Move one: read for the plain sense and settle what is happening to whom. Move two: name the narrator, first person, third limited or omniscient, because the pronouns give it away in a sentence and half the questions depend on it. Move three: mark the register, formal or plain or dialect, and notice any shift, because a shift means a second voice has entered. Move four: find the passage's turn, the sentence where the situation or the judgment changes, which in a short excerpt is usually near the end. Move five: name what the passage claims, in one sentence with a verb, which is the theme. Move six: test that sentence against the passage's last clause, which is where prose most often deposits its point.
In practice
Sense, narrator, register, turn, claim, test.
Where people slip
A passage can describe at length and argue in one clause. Reading for the argument means reading for the clause that evaluates, not the clauses that narrate, and in the board's own examples the evaluating clause comes last.
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