American Literature / Unit 2 AML 0131 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Three Traps in Prose Questions
The idea
Three errors account for most lost marks on prose questions. The first is answering the theme question with the subject, choosing an option that names what the passage is about rather than what it argues; the cure is insisting on an option with a verb in it. The second is treating a narrator's judgment as the work's, which the free indirect construction makes easy; the cure is asking whether the details support the sentence. The third is choosing an option that is true of the whole book rather than of the printed passage, which rewards prior knowledge and is the reason the board's passages are self-contained; the cure is answering only from what is on the page.
In practice
Subject for theme, narrator for author, book for passage.
Where people slip
A fourth error is rarer and costlier: deciding what a passage must mean from the author's reputation. The board prints passages without attribution for the questions that test reading, and supplies attribution only when the question is about knowledge.
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