Analyzing and Interpreting Literature / Unit 4 AIL 0328 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Lexicon: Further Terms, Detached
Captions available
The idea
Detachment has its own vocabulary: dispassionate, clinical, matter-of-fact, reportorial, measured. Each describes a writer withholding any evident attitude from the page. They are often the correct answer for eighteenth-century prose, and candidates tend to reject them because a neutral option feels insufficiently literary to be right.
In practice
Dispassionate, clinical, measured.
Where people slip
Candidates under-select these.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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