Finding the Theme a Passage Argues

The idea

A best-describes-the-theme question is answered by four steps. Step one: write the subject as a noun phrase, which for the board's example passage is a mistress who owned slaves. Step two: find the sentences that evaluate rather than describe; in that passage the narrator says slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to him, and that the tender heart became stone. Step three: turn the evaluation into a claim with a verb, which gives that slaveholding corrupted the woman who practised it. Step four: test each option against that claim, discarding options that are true of the passage but narrower than its argument. There, the options that slaveholders were naturally cruel and that women could be as cruel as men both contradict a passage insisting she began kind; the option that she was corrupted by unchecked power is the passage's own explanation.