American Literature / Unit 4 AML 0326 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Puritan Text for Its Doctrine
The idea
A Puritan passage on the exam is answered by tracing its doctrine, and four steps do it. Step one: find the event, which is usually concrete and domestic, a fire, a birth, a capture, a voyage. Step two: find the sentence that interprets the event, which will arrive within a few lines and will attribute it to God's hand, either as mercy, trial or judgment. Step three: name which of the three the writer has chosen, because that choice is the passage's claim and the exam's answers are built from it. Step four: check for a scriptural parallel, since typology matches the writer's experience to a biblical one, and a wilderness, an exodus or a Job-like affliction named in the passage tells you what pattern the writer is claiming to repeat.
In practice
Event, interpretation, mercy or trial or judgment, parallel.
Where people slip
Do not read the concrete detail as mere colour. The burnt trunk, the numbered remove and the spider over the fire exist to carry the doctrine, and an answer that stops at the image will miss the claim.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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