How Meaning Questions Are Built

The idea

The ability questions are sixty to sixty-five percent of the exam, and this unit has given you the tools they test. Figures of speech come first. A metaphor carries a tenor by a vehicle, a simile makes the comparison explicit, and a conceit works one comparison out at length, as Donne does with the compasses. Personification gives life to things, apostrophe addresses the absent, metonymy and synecdoche name by association and by part. A symbol means more than itself; an allegory sustains that meaning through a whole story. Imagery appeals to the senses, and a pattern of imagery builds meaning by accumulation, so you trace the pattern rather than seizing one image. Irony sets words, events or knowledge at odds; paradox, oxymoron, hyperbole and litotes contradict, collide, overstate and understate; allusion asks you to complete a reference. Tone is the attitude, read from the words and matched in direction and strength. Style is a writer's habitual choices, which is why authors can be named from quotations. The kinds come next: satire ridicules to correct, parody and mock-heroic imitate to mock, pastoral idealizes the countryside, tragedy brings a great figure down through hamartia, comedy ends in harmony, and the comedy of manners satirizes a society's codes. On stage, the soliloquy and aside tell the audience what others cannot hear, and plot runs from exposition through climax to resolution. In fiction, point of view decides what can be known; free indirect discourse blends narrator and character, stream of consciousness follows a mind, and an unreliable narrator must be read against the evidence. The novel's forms, epistolary, picaresque, Gothic and the bildungsroman, and the short story, essay and memoir complete the map. Last come the question types: criticism read for its claim, authors and periods identified from evidence, and "best describes" answered by what is true of the whole passage.