A Simple Guide To Reading Skills

Reading

Poetry
Major Forms of Poetry
From man’s earliest days, he expressed himself with poetry. A large percentage of the surviving literature from ancient times is in epic poetry, utilized by Homer and other Greco-Roman poets. Epic poems typically recount heroic deeds and adventures, using stylized language and combining dramatic and lyrical conventions. Epistolary poems, poems that are written and read as letters, also developed in ancient times. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ballad became a popular convention. Ballads are often structured with rhyme and meter and focus on subjects such as love, death, and religion. From these early conventions, numerous other poetic forms developed, such as elegies, odes, and pastoral poems. Elegies are mourning poems written in three parts: lament, praise of the deceased, and solace for loss. Odes evolved from songs to the typical poem of the Romantic time period, expressing strong feelings and contemplative thoughts. Pastoral poems idealize nature and country living. Poetry can also be used to make short, pithy statements. Epigrams (memorable rhymes with one or two lines) and limericks (two lines of iambic dimeter followed by two lines of iambic dimeter and another of iambic trimeter) are known for humor and wit.

Haiku
Haiku was originally a Japanese poetry form. In the 13th century, haiku was the opening phrase of renga, a 100-stanza oral poem. By the 16th century, haiku diverged into a separate short poem. When Western writers discovered haiku, the form became popular in English, as well as other languages. A haiku has 17 syllables, traditionally distributed across three lines as 5/7/5, with a pause after the first or second line. Haiku are syllabic and unrhymed. Haiku philosophy and technique are that brevity’s compression forces writers to express images concisely, depict a moment in time, and evoke illumination and enlightenment. An example is 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho’s classic: “An old silent pond… / A frog jumps into the pond, / splash! Silence again.” Modern American poet Ezra Pound revealed the influence of haiku in his two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro”—line 1 has 5+7 syllables, line 2 has 7, but it still preserves haiku’s philosophy and imagistic technique: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”

Sonnets
The sonnet traditionally has 14 lines of iambic pentameter, tightly organized around a theme. The Petrarchan sonnet, named for 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, has an eight-line stanza, the octave, and a six-line stanza, the sestet. There is a change or turn, known as the volta, between the eighth and ninth verses, setting up the sestet’s answer or summary. The rhyme scheme is ABBA/ABBA/CDECDE or CDCDCD. The English or Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and one couplet, with the rhyme scheme ABAB/CDCD/EFEF/GG. This format better suits English, which has fewer rhymes than Italian. The final couplet often contrasts sharply with the preceding quatrains, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets—for example, Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.” Variations on the sonnet form include Edmund Spenser’s Spenserian sonnet in the 16th century, John Milton’s Miltonic sonnet in the 17th century, and sonnet sequences. Sonnet sequences are seen in works such as John Donne’s La Corona and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Prose
Common Forms of Historical Fiction
Historical fiction is set in particular historical periods, including prehistoric and mythological. Examples include Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Ivanhoe; Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Robert Graves’ I, Claudius; Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea (an historical novel using Greek mythology); Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Between the Acts; and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy. Picaresque novels recount episodic adventures of a rogue protagonist or pícaro, like Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Gothic novels originated as a reaction against 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism, featuring horror, mystery, superstition, madness, supernatural elements, and revenge. Early examples include Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Monk, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In America, Edgar Allan Poe wrote many Gothic works. Contemporary novelist Anne Rice has penned many Gothic novels under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. Psychological novels, originating in 17th-century France, explore characters’ motivations. Examples include Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut; George Eliot’s novels; Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; and the novels of Henry James, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Novels of Manners
Novels of manners are fictional stories that observe, explore, and analyze the social behaviors of a specific time and place. While deep psychological themes are more universal across different historical periods and countries, the manners of a particular society are shorter-lived and more varied; the novel of manners captures these societal details. Novels of manners can also be regarded as symbolically representing, in artistic form, certain established and secure social orders. Characteristics of novels of manners include descriptions of a society with defined behavioral codes; the use of standardized, impersonal formulas in their language; and inhibition of emotional expression, as contrasted with the strong emotions expressed in romantic or sentimental novels. Jane Austen’s detailed descriptions of English society and characters struggling with the definitions and restrictions placed on them by society are excellent models of the novel of manners. In the 20th century, Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust is a novel of social manners, and his Sword of Honour trilogy is a novel of military manners. Another 20th-century example is The Unbearable Bassington by Saki (the pen name of writer H. H. Munro), focusing on Edwardian society.

Western-World Sentimental Novels
Sentimental love novels originated in the movement of Romanticism. Eighteenth-century examples of novels that depict emotional rather than only physical love include Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Also in the 18th century, Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) is an example of a novel with elements of sentimentality. The Victorian era’s rejection of emotionalism caused the term “sentimental” to have undesirable connotations. Even non-sentimental novelists such as William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens incorporated sentimental elements in their writing. A 19th-century author of genuinely sentimental novels was Mrs. Henry Wood (e.g., East Lynne, 1861). In the 20th century, Erich Segal’s sentimental novel Love Story (1970) was a popular bestseller.

Epistolary Novels
Epistolary novels are told in the form of letters written by their characters rather than in narrative form. Samuel Richardson, the best-known author of epistolary novels like Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), widely influenced early Romantic epistolary novels throughout Europe that freely expressed emotions. Richardson, a printer, published technical manuals on letter-writing for young gentlewomen; his epistolary novels were natural fictional extensions of those nonfictional instructional books. Nineteenth-century English author Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) was a mystery written in epistolary form. By the 20th century, the format of well-composed written letters came to be regarded as artificial and outmoded. A 20th-century evolution of letters was tape-recording transcripts, such as in French playwright Samuel Beckett’s drama Krapp’s Last Tape. Though evoking modern alienation, Beckett still created a sense of fictional characters’ direct communication without author intervention as Richardson had.

Pastoral Novels
Pastoral novels lyrically idealize country life as idyllic and utopian, akin to the Garden of Eden. Daphnis and Chloe, written by Greek novelist Longus around the second or third century, influenced Elizabethan pastoral romances like Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), which inspired Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590). Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre’s French work Paul et Virginie (1787) demonstrated the early Romantic view of the innocence and goodness of nature. Though the style lost popularity by the 20th century, pastoral elements can still be seen in novels like The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), both by D. H. Lawrence. Growing realism transformed pastoral writing into less ideal and more dystopian, distasteful and ironic depictions of country life in George Eliot’s and Thomas Hardy’s novels. Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog (1964) may demonstrate how urban ills highlight an alternative pastoral ideal. The pastoral style is commonly thought to be overly idealized and outdated today, as seen in Stella Gibbons’ pastoral satire, Cold Comfort Farm (1932).

Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman is German for “education novel.” This term is also used in English to describe “apprenticeship” novels focusing on coming-of-age stories, including youth’s struggles and searches for things such as identity, spiritual understanding, or the meaning in life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is credited as the origin of this genre. Charles Dickens’ two novels David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861) also fit this form. H. G. Wells wrote bildungsromans about questing for apprenticeships to address modern life’s complications in Joan and Peter (1918) and from a Utopian perspective in The Dream (1924). School bildungsromans include Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) and Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). Many Hermann Hesse novels, including Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi, and Beneath the Wheel are bildungsromans about a struggling, searching youth. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) are two modern examples. Variations include J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), set both within and beyond school, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1955), a novel not set in a school but one that is a coming-of-age story nonetheless.

Roman à Clef
Roman à clef, French for “novel with a key,” refers to books that require a real-life frame of reference, or key, for full comprehension. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale contains details that confuse readers unaware of history about the Earl of Bolingbroke’s involvement in an assassination plot. Other literary works fitting this form include John Dryden’s political satirical poem “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681), Jonathan Swift’s satire “A Tale of a Tub” (1704), and George Orwell’s political allegory Animal Farm (1945), all of which cannot be understood completely without knowing their camouflaged historical contents. Roman à clefs disguise truths too dangerous for authors to state directly. Readers must know about the enemies of D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley to appreciate their respective novels: Aaron’s Rod (1922) and Point Counter Point (1928). Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherché du temps perdu, 1871-1922) is informed by his social context. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an enormous roman à clef containing multitudinous personal references.

Realism
Realism is a literary form with the goal of representing reality as faithfully as possible. Its genesis in Western literature was a reaction against the sentimentality and extreme emotionalism of the works written in the literary movement of Romanticism, which championed feelings and their expression. Realists focused in great detail on immediacy of time and place, on specific actions of their characters, and the justifiable consequences of those actions. Some techniques of realism include writing in the vernacular (conversational language), using specific dialects and placing an emphasis on character rather than plot. Realistic literature often addresses ethical issues. Historically, realistic works have often concentrated on the middle classes of the authors’ societies. Realists eschew treatments that are too dramatic or sensationalistic as exaggerations of the reality that they strive to portray as closely as they are able. Influenced by his own bleak past, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote several novels, such as Crime and Punishment (1866) that shunned romantic ideals and sought to portray a stark reality. Henry James was a prominent writer of realism in novels such as Daisy Miller (1879). Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) skillfully represented the language and culture of lower-class Mississippi in his novel Huckleberry Finn (1885).

Satire
Satire uses sarcasm, irony, and/or humor as social criticism to lampoon human folly. Unlike realism, which intends to depict reality as it exists without exaggeration, satire often involves creating situations or ideas deliberately exaggerating reality to be ridiculous to illuminate flawed behaviors. Ancient Roman satirists included Horace and Juvenal. Alexander Pope’s poem “The Rape of the Lock” satirized the values of fashionable members of the 18th-century upper-middle class, which Pope found shallow and trivial. The theft of a lock of hair from a young woman is blown out of proportion: the poem’s characters regard it as seriously as they would a rape. Irishman Jonathan Swift satirized British society, politics, and religion in works like “A Tale of a Tub.” In “A Modest Proposal,” Swift used essay form and mock-serious tone, satirically “proposing” cannibalism of babies and children as a solution to poverty and overpopulation. He satirized petty political disputes in Gulliver’s Travels.

Drama
Early Development
English drama originally developed from religious ritual. Early Christians established traditions of presenting pageants or mystery plays, traveling on wagons and carts through the streets to depict biblical events. Medieval tradition assigned responsibility for performing specific plays to the different guilds. In Middle English, “mystery” meant both religious ritual/truth, and craft/trade. Historically, mystery plays were to be reproduced exactly the same every time like religious rituals. However, some performers introduced individual interpretations of roles and even improvised. Thus, drama was born. Narrative detail and nuanced acting were evident in mystery cycles by the Middle Ages. As individualized performance evolved, plays on other subjects also developed. Middle English mystery plays extant include the York Cycle, Coventry Cycle, Chester Mystery Plays, N-Town Plays, and Towneley/Wakefield Plays. In recent times, these plays began to draw interest again, and several modern actors such as Dame Judi Dench began their careers with mystery plays.

Defining Characteristics
In the Middle Ages, plays were commonly composed in verse. By the time of the Renaissance, Shakespeare and other dramatists wrote plays that mixed prose, rhymed verse, and blank verse. The traditions of costumes and masks were seen in ancient Greek drama, medieval mystery plays, and Renaissance drama. Conventions like asides, in which actors make comments directly to the audience unheard by other characters, and soliloquies (dramatic monologues) were also common during Shakespeare’s Elizabethan dramatic period. Monologues date back to ancient Greek drama. Elizabethan dialogue tended to use colloquial prose for lower-class characters’ speech and stylized verse for upper-class characters. Another Elizabethan convention was the play-within-a-play, as in Hamlet. As drama moved toward realism, dialogue became less poetic and more conversational, as in most modern English-language plays. Contemporary drama, both onstage and onscreen, includes a convention of breaking the fourth wall, as actors directly face and address audiences.

Comedy
Today, most people equate the idea of comedy with something funny, and of tragedy with something sad. However, the ancient Greeks defined these differently. Comedy needed not be humorous or amusing; it needed only a happy ending. The classical definition of comedy, as included in Aristotle’s works, is any work that tells the story of a sympathetic main character’s rise in fortune. According to Aristotle, protagonists need not be heroic or exemplary, nor evil or worthless, but ordinary people— “average to below average” morally. Comic figures who were sympathetic were usually of humble origins, proving their “natural nobility” through their actions as they were tested, rather than characters born into nobility—who were often satirized as self-important or pompous.

Shakespearean Comedy
William Shakespeare lived in England from 1564-1616. He was a poet and playwright of the Renaissance period in Western culture. He is generally considered the foremost dramatist in world literature and the greatest author to write in the English language. He wrote many poems, particularly sonnets, of which 154 survive today, and approximately 38 plays. Though his sonnets are greater in number and are very famous, he is best known for his plays, including comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies and historical plays. His play titles include: All’s Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter’s Tale, King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Some scholars have suggested that Christopher Marlowe wrote several of Shakespeare’s works. While most scholars reject this theory, Shakespeare did pay homage to his contemporary, alluding to several of his characters, themes, or verbiage, as well as borrowing themes from several of his plays: Marlowe’s Jew of Malta influenced Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, etc.

When Shakespeare was writing, during the Elizabethan period of the Renaissance, Aristotle’s version of comedies was popular. While some of Shakespeare’s comedies were humorous and others were not, all had happy endings. A Comedy of Errors is a farce. Based and expanding on a Classical Roman comedy, it is lighthearted and includes slapstick humor and mistaken identity. Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic comedy. It incorporates some more serious themes, including social mores, perceived infidelity, marriage’s duality as both trap and ideal, honor and its loss, public shame, and deception, but also much witty dialogue and a happy ending.

Dramatic Comedy
Three types of dramas classified as comedy include the farce, the romantic comedy, and the satirical comedy.

Farce
The farce is a zany, goofy type of comedy that includes pratfalls and other forms of slapstick humor. The characters in a farce tend to be ridiculous or fantastical in nature. The plot also tends to contain highly improbable events, featuring complications and twists that continue throughout, and incredible coincidences that could never occur in reality. Mistaken identity, deceptions, and disguises are common devices used in farcical comedies. Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors, with its cases of accidental mistaken identity and slapstick, is an example of farce. Contemporary examples of farce include the Marx Brothers’ movies, the Three Stooges movies and TV episodes, and the Pink Panther movie series.

Romantic Comedy
Romantic comedies are probably the most popular of the types of comedy, in both live theater performances and movies. They include not only humor and a happy ending, but also love. In the typical plot of a romantic comedy, two people well suited to one another are either brought together for the first time, or reconciled after being separated. They are usually both sympathetic characters, and seem destined to be together yet separated by some intervening complication—such as ex-lovers, interfering parents or friends, or differences in social class. The happy ending is achieved through the lovers’ overcoming all these obstacles. William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing; Walt Disney’s version of Cinderella (1950); Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (1955); and movies Princess Bride (1987), directed by Rob Reiner; Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), both directed by Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; and Forget Paris (1995), co-written, produced, directed by and starring Billy Crystal, are examples of romantic comedies.

Satirical Comedy and Black Comedy
Satires generally mock and lampoon human foolishness and vices. Satirical comedies fit the classical definition of comedy by depicting a main character’s rise in fortune, but they also fit the definition of satire by making that main character either a fool, morally corrupt, or cynical in attitude. All or most of the other characters in the satirical comedy display similar foibles. These include cuckolded spouses, dupes, and other gullible types; tricksters, con artists, and criminals; hypocrites; fortune seekers; and other deceptive types who prey on the gullible, who are their willing and unwitting victims. Some classical examples of satirical comedies include The Birds by ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes, and Volpone by 17th-century poet and playwright Ben Jonson, who made the comedy of humors popular. When satirical comedy is extended to extremes, it becomes black comedy, wherein the comedic occurrences are grotesque or terrible.

Tragedy
The opposite of comedy is tragedy, portraying a hero’s fall in fortune. While by classical definitions, tragedies could be sad, Aristotle went further, requiring that they depict suffering and pain to cause “terror and pity” in audiences. Additionally, he decreed that tragic heroes be basically good, admirable, and/or noble, and that their downfalls be through personal action, choice, or error, not by bad luck or accident.

Aristotle’s Criteria for Tragedy
In his Poetics, Aristotle defined five critical terms relative to tragedy. (1) Anagnorisis: Meaning tragic insight or recognition, this is a moment of realization by a tragic hero(ine) when s/he suddenly understands how s/he has enmeshed himself/herself in a “web of fate.” (2) Hamartia: This is often called a “tragic flaw,” but is better described as a tragic error. Hamartia is an archery term meaning a shot missing the bull’s eye, used here as a metaphor for a mistake—often a simple one—which results in catastrophe. (3) Hubris: While often called “pride,” this is actually translated as “violent transgression,” and signifies an arrogant overstepping of moral or cultural bounds—the sin of the tragic hero who over-presumes or over-aspires. (4) Nemesis: translated as “retribution,” this represents the cosmic punishment or payback that the tragic hero ultimately receives for committing hubristic acts. (5) Peripateia: Literally “turning,” this is a plot reversal consisting of a tragic hero’s pivotal action, which changes his/her status from safe to endangered.

Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) proposed a different theory of tragedy than Aristotle (384-322 BCE), which was also very influential. Whereas Aristotle’s criteria involved character and plot, Hegel defined tragedy as a dynamic conflict of opposite forces or rights. For example, if an individual believes in the moral philosophy of the conscientious objector, i.e., that fighting in wars is morally wrong, but is confronted with being drafted into military service, this conflict would fit Hegel’s definition of a tragic plot premise. Hegel theorized that a tragedy must involve some circumstance in which two values, or two rights, are fatally at odds with one another and conflict directly. Hegel did not view this as good triumphing over evil, or evil winning out over good, but rather as one good fighting against another good unto death. He saw this conflict of two goods as truly tragic. In ancient Greek playwright Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, the main character experiences this tragic conflict between her public duties and her family and religious responsibilities.

Revenge Tragedy
Along with Aristotelian definitions of comedy and tragedy, ancient Greece was the origin of the revenge tragedy. This genre became highly popular in Renaissance England, and is still popular today in contemporary movies. In a revenge tragedy, the protagonist has suffered a serious wrong, such as the assault and murder of a family member. However, the wrongdoer has not been punished. In contemporary plots, this often occurs when some legal technicality has interfered with the miscreant’s conviction and sentencing, or when authorities are unable to locate and apprehend the criminal. The protagonist then faces the conflict of suffering this injustice, or exacting his or her own justice by seeking revenge. Greek revenge tragedies include Agamemnon and Medea. Playwright Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1582-1592) is credited with beginning the Elizabethan genre of revenge tragedies. Shakespearean revenge tragedies include Hamlet (1599-1602) and Titus Andronicus (1588-1593). A Jacobean example is Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606, 1607).

Hamlet’s “Tragic Flaw”
Despite virtually limitless interpretations, one way to view Hamlet’s tragic error generally is as indecision. He suffers the classic revenge tragedy’s conflict of whether to suffer with his knowledge of his mother’s and uncle’s assassination of his father, or to exact his own revenge and justice against Claudius, who has assumed the throne after his crime went unknown and unpunished. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be” reflects this dilemma. Hamlet muses “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?” Hamlet both longs for and fears death, as “the dread of something after death … makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not … Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” For most of the play, the protagonist struggles with his responsibility in avenging his father, who was killed by Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. So Hamlet’s tragic error at first might be considered a lack of action. But he then makes several attempts at revenge, each of which end in worse tragedy, until his efforts are ended by the final tragedy – Hamlet’s own murder.

Making Predictions
When we read literature, making predictions about what will happen in the writing reinforces our purpose for reading and prepares us mentally. We can make predictions before we begin reading and during our reading. As we read on, we can test the accuracy of our predictions, revise them in light of additional reading, and confirm or refute our predictions. A reader can make predictions by observing the title and illustrations; noting the structure, characters, and subject; drawing on existing knowledge relative to the subject; and asking “why” and “who” questions. Connecting reading to what we already know enables us to learn new information and construct meaning. For example, before third-graders read a book about Johnny Appleseed, they may start a KWL chart—a list of what they Know, what they Want to know or learn, and what they have Learned after reading. Activating existing background knowledge and thinking about the text before reading improves comprehension.

Drawing Inferences
Inferences about literary text are logical conclusions that readers make based on their observations and previous knowledge. By inferring, readers construct meanings from text relevant to them personally. By combining their own schemas or concepts and their background information pertinent to the text with what they read, readers interpret it according to both what the author has conveyed and their own unique perspectives. Authors do not always explicitly spell out every meaning in what they write; many meanings are implicit. Through inference, readers can comprehend implied meanings in the text, and also derive personal significance from it, making the text meaningful and memorable to them. Inference is a natural process in everyday life. When readers infer, they can draw conclusions about what the author is saying, predict what may reasonably follow, amend these predictions as they continue to read, interpret the import of themes, and analyze the characters’ feelings and motivations through their actions.

Making Connections to Enhance Comprehension
Reading involves thinking. For good comprehension, readers make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. Making connections helps readers understand text better and predict what might occur next based on what they already know, such as how characters in the story feel or what happened in another text. Text-to-self connections with the reader’s life and experiences make literature more personally relevant and meaningful to readers. Readers can make connections before, during, and after reading—including whenever the text reminds them of something similar they have encountered in life or other texts. The genre, setting, characters, plot elements, literary structure and devices, and themes an author uses allow a reader to make connections to other works of literature or to people and events in their own lives. Venn diagrams and other graphic organizers help visualize connections. Readers can also make double-entry notes: key content, ideas, events, words, and quotations on one side, and the connections with these on the other.

Summarizing Literature to Support Comprehension
When reading literature, especially demanding works, summarizing helps readers identify important information and organize it in their minds. They can also identify themes, problems, and solutions, and can sequence the story. Readers can summarize before, during, and after they read. They should use their own words, as they do when describing a personal event or giving directions. Previewing a text’s organization before reading by examining the book cover, table of contents, and illustrations also aids summarizing. So does making notes of key words and ideas in a graphic organizer while reading. Graphic organizers are another useful method; readers skim the text to determine main ideas and then narrow the list with the aid of the organizer. Unimportant details should be omitted in summaries. Summaries can include description, problem-solution, comparison-contrast, sequence, main ideas, and cause-and-effect.

Evaluation of Summaries
A summary of a literary passage is a condensation in the reader’s own words of the passage’s main points. Several guidelines can be used in evaluating a summary. The summary should be complete yet concise. It should be accurate, balanced, fair, neutral, and objective, excluding the reader’s own opinions or reactions. It should reflect in similar proportion how much each point summarized was covered in the original passage. Summary writers should include tags of attribution, like “Macaulay argues that” to reference the original author whose ideas are represented in the summary. Summary writers should not overuse quotations; they should only quote central concepts or phrases they cannot precisely convey in words other than those of the original author. Another aspect in evaluating a summary is whether it can stand alone as a coherent, unified composition. In addition, evaluation of a summary should include whether its writer has cited the original source of the passage so that readers can find it.

Textual Evidence to Analyze Literature
Knowing about the historical background and social context of a literary work, as well as the identity of that work’s author, can help to inform the reader about the author’s concerns and intended meanings. For example, George Orwell published his novel 1984 in the year 1949, soon after the end of World War II. At that time, following the defeat of the Nazis, the Cold War began between the Western Allied nations and the Eastern Soviet Communists. People were therefore concerned about the conflict between the freedoms afforded by Western democracies versus the oppression represented by Communism. Orwell had also previously fought in the Spanish Civil War against a Spanish regime that he and his fellows viewed as oppressive. From this information, readers can infer that Orwell was concerned about oppression by totalitarian governments. This informs 1984’s story of Winston Smith’s rebellion against the oppressive “Big Brother” government of the fictional dictatorial state of Oceania and his capture, torture, and ultimate conversion by that government.

Textual Evidence to Evaluate Predictions
Textual evidence to evaluate reader predictions about literature includes specific synopses of the work, paraphrases of the work or parts of it, and direct quotations from it. The best literary analysis shows special insight into a theme, character trait, or change. The best textual evidence is strong, relevant, and accurate. Analysis that is not best, but enough, shows reasonable understanding of theme, character trait, or change; contains supporting textual evidence that is relevant and accurate, if not strong; and shows a specific and clear response. Analysis that partially meets criteria also shows reasonable understanding, but the textual evidence is generalized, incomplete, only partly relevant or accurate, or connected only weakly. Inadequate analysis is vague, too general, or incorrect; it may give irrelevant or incomplete textual evidence, or may simply summarize the plot rather than analyzing the work.

Main Idea and Supporting Details

Understanding a Passage
One of the most important skills in reading comprehension is the identification of topics and main ideas. There is a subtle difference between these two features. The topic is the subject of a text (i.e., what the text is all about). The main idea, on the other hand, is the most important point being made by the author. The topic is usually expressed in a few words at the most while the main idea often needs a full sentence to be completely defined. As an example, a short passage might have the topic of penguins and the main idea could be written as Penguins are different from other birds in many ways. In most nonfiction writing, the topic and the main idea will be stated directly and often appear in a sentence at the very beginning or end of the text. When being tested on an understanding of the author's topic, you may be able to skim the passage for the general idea, by reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. A body paragraph’s first sentence is often—but not always—the main topic sentence which gives you a summary of the content in the paragraph.

However, there are cases in which the reader must figure out an unstated topic or main idea. In these instances, you must read every sentence of the text and try to come up with an overarching idea that is supported by each of those sentences.

Note: The main idea should not be confused with the thesis statement. While the main idea gives a brief, general summary of a text, the thesis statement provides a specific perspective on an issue that the author supports with evidence.

Supporting details provide evidence and backing for the main point. In order to show that a main idea is correct, or valid, authors add details that prove their point. All texts contain details, but they are only classified as supporting details when they serve to reinforce some larger point. Supporting details are most commonly found in informative and persuasive texts. In some cases, they will be clearly indicated with terms like for example or for instance, or they will be enumerated with terms like first, second, and last. However, you need to be prepared for texts that do not contain those indicators. As a reader, you should consider whether the author’s supporting details really back up his or her main point. Supporting details can be factual and correct, yet they may not be relevant to the author’s point. Conversely, supporting details can seem pertinent, but they can be ineffective because they are based on opinion or assertions that cannot be proven.

An example of a main idea is: Giraffes live in the Serengeti of Africa. A supporting detail about giraffes could be: A giraffe in this region benefits from a long neck by reaching twigs and leaves on tall trees. The main idea gives the general idea that the text is about giraffes. The supporting detail gives a specific fact about how the giraffes eat.

Evaluating a Passage
It is important to understand the logical conclusion of the ideas presented in an informational text. Identifying a logical conclusion can help you determine whether you agree with the writer or not. Coming to this conclusion is much like making an inference: the approach requires you to combine the information given by the text with what you already know in order to make a logical conclusion. If the author intended the reader to draw a certain conclusion, then you can expect the author’s argumentation and detail to be leading in that direction.

One way to approach the task of drawing conclusions is to make brief notes of all the points made by the author. When the notes are arranged on paper, they may clarify the logical conclusion. Another way to approach conclusions is to consider whether the reasoning of the author raises any pertinent questions. Sometimes you will be able to draw several conclusions from a passage. On occasion these will be conclusions that were never imagined by the author. Therefore, be aware that these conclusions must be supported directly by the text.

Making Logical Conclusions about a Passage
A reader should always be drawing conclusions from the text. Sometimes conclusions are implied from written information, and other times the information is stated directly within the passage. One should always aim to draw conclusions from information stated within a passage, rather than to draw them from mere implications. At times an author may provide some information and then describe a counterargument. Readers should be alert for direct statements that are subsequently rejected or weakened by the author. Furthermore, you should always read through the entire passage before drawing conclusions. Many readers are trained to expect the author’s conclusions at either the beginning or the end of the passage, but many texts do not adhere to this format.

Drawing conclusions from information implied within a passage requires confidence on the part of the reader. Implications are things that the author does not state directly, but readers can assume based on what the author does say. Consider the following passage: I stepped outside and opened my umbrella. By the time I got to work, the cuffs of my pants were soaked. The author never states that it is raining, but this fact is clearly implied. Conclusions based on implication must be well supported by the text. In order to draw a solid conclusion, readers should have multiple pieces of evidence. If readers have only one piece, they must be assured that there is no other possible explanation than their conclusion. A good reader will be able to draw many conclusions from information implied by the text, which will be a great help on the exam.

Outlining a Passage
As an aid to drawing conclusions, outlining the information contained in the passage should be a familiar skill to readers. An effective outline will reveal the structure of the passage and will lead to solid conclusions. An effective outline will have a title that refers to the basic subject of the text though the title does not need to restate the main idea. In most outlines, the main idea will be the first major section. Each major idea of the passage will be established as the head of a category. For instance, the most common outline format calls for the main ideas of the passage to be indicated with Roman numerals. In an effective outline of this kind, each of the main ideas will be represented by a Roman numeral and none of the Roman numerals will designate minor details or secondary ideas. Moreover, all supporting ideas and details should be placed in the appropriate place on the outline. An outline does not need to include every detail listed in the text, but the it should feature all of those that are central to the argument or message. Each of these details should be listed under the appropriate main idea.

Using Graphic Organizers
Ideas from a text can also be organized using graphic organizers. A graphic organizer is a way to simplify information and take key points from the text. A graphic organizer such as a timeline may have an event listed for a corresponding date on the timeline while an outline may have an event listed under a key point that occurs in the text. Each reader needs to create the type of graphic organizer that works the best for him or her in terms of being able to recall information from a story. Examples include a spider-map, which takes a main idea from the story and places it in a bubble with supporting points branching off the main idea. An outline is useful for diagramming the main and supporting points of the entire story, and a Venn diagram classifies information as separate or overlapping.

Summarizing
A helpful tool is the ability to summarize the information that you have read in a paragraph or passage format. This process is similar to creating an effective outline. First, a summary should accurately define the main idea of the passage, though the summary does not need to explain this main idea in exhaustive detail. The summary should continue by laying out the most important supporting details or arguments from the passage. All of the significant supporting details should be included, and none of the details included should be irrelevant or insignificant. Also, the summary should accurately report all of these details. Too often, the desire for brevity in a summary leads to the sacrifice of clarity or accuracy. Summaries are often difficult to read because they omit all of the graceful language, digressions, and asides that distinguish great writing. However, an effective summary should contain much the same message as the original text.

Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is another method that the reader can use to aid in comprehension. When paraphrasing, one puts what they have read into their words by rephrasing what the author has written, or one “translates” all of what the author shared into their words by including as many details as they can.

Organization within a Passage
Organization of the Text
The way a text is organized can help readers to understand the author’s intent and his or her conclusions. There are various ways to organize a text, and each one has a purpose and use. Usually, authors will organize information logically in a passage so the reader can follow and locate the information within the text. However, since not all passages are written with the same logical structure, you need to be familiar with several different types of passage structure.

Chronological
When using chronological order, the author presents information in the order that it happened. For example, biographies are typically written in chronological order. The subject’s birth and childhood are presented first, followed by their adult life, and lastly the events leading up to the person’s death.

Cause and Effect
One of the most common text structures is cause and effect. A cause is an act or event that makes something happen, and an effect is the thing that happens as a result of the cause. A cause-and-effect relationship is not always explicit, but there are some terms in English that signal causes, such as since, because, and due to. Furthermore, terms that signal effects include consequently, therefore, this leads to. As an example, consider the sentence Because the sky was clear, Ron did not bring an umbrella. The cause is the clear sky, and the effect is that Ron did not bring an umbrella. However, readers may find that sometimes the cause-and-effect relationship will not be clearly noted. For instance, the sentence He was late and missed the meeting does not contain any signaling words, but the sentence still contains a cause (he was late) and an effect (he missed the meeting).

Multiple Effects
Be aware of the possibility for a single cause to have multiple effects. (e.g., Single cause: Because you left your homework on the table, your dog engulfs the assignment. Multiple effects: As a result, you receive a failing grade; your parents do not allow you to visit your friends; you miss out on the new movie and meeting a potential significant other).

Multiple Causes
Also, there is the possibility for a single effect to have multiple causes. (e.g., Single effect: Alan has a fever. Multiple causes: An unexpected cold front came through the area, and Alan forgot to take his multi-vitamin to avoid being sick.) Additionally, an effect can in turn be the cause of another effect, in what is known as a cause-and-effect chain. (e.g., As a result of her disdain for procrastination, Lynn prepared for her exam. This led to her passing her test with high marks. Hence, her resume was accepted and her application was approved.)

Cause and Effect in Persuasive Essays
Persuasive essays, in which an author tries to make a convincing argument and change the minds of readers, usually include cause-and-effect relationships. However, these relationships should not always be taken at face value. Frequently, an author will assume a cause or take an effect for granted. To read a persuasive essay effectively, readers need to judge the cause-and-effect relationships that the author is presenting. For instance, imagine an author wrote the following: The parking deck has been unprofitable because people would prefer to ride their bikes. The relationship is clear: the cause is that people prefer to ride their bikes, and the effect is that the parking deck has been unprofitable. However, readers should consider whether this argument is conclusive. Perhaps there are other reasons for the failure of the parking deck: a down economy, excessive fees, etc. Too often, authors present causal relationships as if they are fact rather than opinion. Readers should be on the alert for these dubious claims.

Problem-Solution
Some nonfiction texts are organized to present a problem followed by a solution. For this type of text, the problem is often explained before the solution is offered. In some cases, as when the problem is well known, the solution may be introduced briefly at the beginning. Other passages may focus on the solution, and the problem will be referenced only occasionally. Some texts will outline multiple solutions to a problem, leaving readers to choose among them. If the author has an interest or an allegiance to one solution, he or she may fail to mention or describe accurately some of the other solutions. Readers should be careful of the author’s agenda when reading a problem-solution text. Only by understanding the author’s perspective and interests can one develop a proper judgment of the proposed solution.

Compare and Contrast
Many texts follow the compare-and-contrast model in which the similarities and differences between two ideas or things are explored. Analysis of the similarities between ideas is called comparison. In an ideal comparison, the author places ideas or things in an equivalent structure, i.e., the author presents the ideas in the same way. If an author wants to show the similarities between cricket and baseball, then he or she may do so by summarizing the equipment and rules for each game. Be mindful of the similarities as they appear in the passage and take note of any differences that are mentioned. Often, these small differences will only reinforce the more general similarity.

Thinking critically about ideas and conclusions can seem like a daunting task. One way to ease this task is to understand the basic elements of ideas and writing techniques. Looking at the way different ideas relate to each other can be a good way for readers to begin their analysis. For instance, sometimes authors will write about two ideas that are in opposition to each other. Or one author will provide his or her ideas on a topic, and another author may respond in opposition. The analysis of these opposing ideas is known as contrast. Contrast is often marred by the author’s obvious partiality to one of the ideas. A discerning reader will be put off by an author who does not engage in a fair fight. In an analysis of opposing ideas, both ideas should be presented in clear and reasonable terms. If the author does prefer a side, you need to read carefully to determine the areas where the author shows or avoids this preference. In an analysis of opposing ideas, you should proceed through the passage by marking the major differences point by point with an eye that is looking for an explanation of each side’s view. For instance, in an analysis of capitalism and communism, there is an importance in outlining each side’s view on labor, markets, prices, personal responsibility, etc. Additionally, as you read through the passages, you should note whether the opposing views present each side in a similar manner.

Sequence
Readers must be able to identify a text’s sequence, or the order in which things happen. Often, when the sequence is very important to the author, the text is indicated with signal words like first, then, next, and last. However, a sequence can be merely implied and must be noted by the reader. Consider the sentence He walked through the garden and gave water and fertilizer to the plants. Clearly, the man did not walk through the garden before he collected water and fertilizer for the plants. So, the implied sequence is that he first collected water, then he collected fertilizer, next he walked through the garden, and last he gave water or fertilizer as necessary to the plants. Texts do not always proceed in an orderly sequence from first to last. Sometimes they begin at the end and start over at the beginning. As a reader, you can enhance your understanding of the passage by taking brief notes to clarify the sequence.

Transitions
Transitional words and phrases are devices that guide readers through a text. You are no doubt familiar with the common transitions, though you may never have considered how they operate. Some transitional phrases (after, before, during, in the middle of) give information about time. Some indicate that an example is about to be given (for example, in fact, for instance). Writers use them to compare (also, likewise) and contrast (however, but, yet). Transitional words and phrases can suggest addition (and, also, furthermore, moreover) and logical relationships (if, then, therefore, as a result, since). Finally, transitional words and phrases can separate the steps in a process (first, second, last).

Point of View
Another element that impacts a text is the author's point of view. The point of view of a text is the perspective from which a passage is told. An author will always have a point of view about a story before he or she draws up a plot line. The author will know what events they want to take place, how they want the characters to interact, and how they want the story to resolve. An author will also have an opinion on the topic or series of events which is presented in the story that is based on their prior experience and beliefs.

The two main points of view that authors use, especially in a work of fiction, are first person and third person. If the narrator of the story is also the main character, or protagonist, the text is written in first-person point of view. In first person, the author writes from the perspective of I. Third-person point of view is probably the most common that authors use in their passages. Using third person, authors refer to each character by using he or she. In third-person omniscient, the narrator is not a character in the story and tells the story of all of the characters at the same time.

Purposes for Writing
In order to be an effective reader, one must pay attention to the author’s position and purpose. Even those texts that seem objective and impartial, like textbooks, have a position and bias. Readers need to take these positions into account when considering the author’s message. When an author uses emotional language or clearly favors one side of an argument, his or her position is clear. However, the author’s position may be evident not only in what he or she writes, but also in what he or she doesn’t write. In a normal setting, a reader would want to review some other texts on the same topic in order to develop a view of the author’s position. If this was not possible, then you would want to acquire some background about the author. However, since you are in the middle of an exam and the only source of information is the text, you should look for language and argumentation that seems to indicate a particular stance on the subject.

Usually, identifying the purpose of an author is easier than identifying his or her position. In most cases, the author has no interest in hiding his or her purpose. A text that is meant to entertain, for instance, should be written to please the reader. Most narratives, or stories, are written to entertain, though they may also inform or persuade. Informative texts are easy to identify, while the most difficult purpose of a text to identify is persuasion because the author has an interest in making this purpose hard to detect. When a reader discovers that the author is trying to persuade, he or she should be skeptical of the argument. For this reason, persuasive texts often try to establish an entertaining tone and hope to amuse the reader into agreement. On the other hand, an informative tone may be implemented to create an appearance of authority and objectivity.

An author’s purpose is evident often in the organization of the text (e.g., section headings in bold font points to an informative text). However, you may not have such organization available to you in your exam. Instead, if the author makes his or her main idea clear from the beginning, then the likely purpose of the text is to inform. If the author begins by making a claim and provides various arguments to support that claim, then the purpose is probably to persuade. If the author tells a story or seems to want the attention of the reader more than to push a particular point or deliver information, then his or her purpose is most likely to entertain. As a reader, you must judge authors on how well they accomplish their purpose. In other words, you need to consider the type of passage (e.g., technical, persuasive, etc.) that the author has written and if the author has followed the requirements of the passage type.

Evaluating an Argument
Argumentative and persuasive passages take a stand on a debatable issue, seek to explore all sides of the issue, and find the best possible solution. Argumentative and persuasive passages should not be combative or abusive. The word argument may remind you of two or more people shouting at each other and walking away in anger. However, an argumentative or persuasive passage should be a calm and reasonable presentation of an author’s ideas for others to consider. When an author writes reasonable arguments, his or her goal is not to win or have the last word. Instead, authors want to reveal current understanding of the question at hand and suggest a solution to a problem. The purpose of argument and persuasion in a free society is to reach the best solution.

Evidence
The term text evidence refers to information that supports a main point or minor points and can help lead the reader to a conclusion. Information used as text evidence is precise, descriptive, and factual. A main point is often followed by supporting details that provide evidence to back up a claim. For example, a passage may include the claim that winter occurs during opposite months in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Text evidence based on this claim may include countries where winter occurs in opposite months along with reasons that winter occurs at different times of the year in separate hemispheres (due to the tilt of the Earth as it rotates around the sun).

Evidence needs to be provided that supports the thesis and additional arguments. Most arguments must be supported by facts or statistics. Facts are something that is known with certainty and have been verified by several independent individuals. Examples and illustrations add an emotional component to arguments. With this component, you persuade readers in ways that facts and statistics cannot. The emotional component is effective when used with objective information that can be confirmed.

Credibility
The text used to support an argument can be the argument’s downfall if the text is not credible. A text is credible, or believable, when the author is knowledgeable and objective, or unbiased. The author’s motivations for writing the text play a critical role in determining the credibility of the text and must be evaluated when assessing that credibility. Reports written about the ozone layer by an environmental scientist and a hairdresser will have a different level of credibility.

Appeal to Emotion
Sometimes, authors will appeal to the reader’s emotion in an attempt to persuade or to distract the reader from the weakness of the argument. For instance, the author may try to inspire the pity of the reader by delivering a heart-rending story. An author also might use the bandwagon approach, in which he suggests that his opinion is correct because it is held by the majority. Some authors resort to name-calling, in which insults and harsh words are delivered to the opponent in an attempt to distract. In advertising, a common appeal is the celebrity testimonial, in which a famous person endorses a product. Of course, the fact that a famous person likes something should not really mean anything to the reader. These and other emotional appeals are usually evidence of poor reasoning and a weak argument.

Counter Arguments
When authors give both sides to the argument, they build trust with their readers. As a reader, you should start with an undecided or neutral position. If an author presents only his or her side to the argument, then you will need to be concerned at best.

Building common ground with neutral or opposed readers can be appealing to skeptical readers. Sharing values with undecided readers can allow people to switch positions without giving up what they feel is important. For people who may oppose a position, they need to feel that they can change their minds without betraying who they are as a person. This appeal to having an open mind can be a powerful tool in arguing a position without antagonizing other views. Objections can be countered on a point-by-point basis or in a summary paragraph. Be mindful of how an author points out flaws in counter arguments. If they are unfair to the other side of the argument, then you should lose trust with the author.

Opinions, Facts, and Fallacies
Critical thinking skills are mastered through understanding various types of writing and the different purposes of authors in writing their passages. Every author writes for a purpose. When you understand their purpose and how they accomplish their goal, you will be able to analyze their writing and determine whether or not you agree with their conclusions.

Readers must always be conscious of the distinction between fact and opinion. A fact can be subjected to analysis and can be either proved or disproved. An opinion, on the other hand, is the author’s personal thoughts or feelings which may not be alterable by research or evidence. If the author writes that the distance from New York City to Boston is about two hundred miles, then he or she is stating a fact. If the author writes that New York City is too crowded, then he or she is giving an opinion because there is no objective standard for “too crowded.” Opinions are often supported by facts. For instance, the author might cite the population density of New York City as compared to that of other major American cities as evidence of an overcrowded population. An opinion supported by fact tends to be more convincing. On the other hand, when authors support their opinions with other opinions, readers should not be persuaded by the argument to any degree.

Reliable Sources
When you have an argumentative passage, you need to be sure that facts are presented to the reader from reliable sources. An opinion is what the author thinks about a given topic. An opinion is not common knowledge or proven by expert sources, instead the information is the personal beliefs and thoughts of the author. To distinguish between fact and opinion, a reader needs to consider the type of source that is presenting information, the information that backs-up a claim, and the author’s motivation to have a certain point-of-view on a given topic. For example, if a panel of scientists has conducted multiple studies on the effectiveness of taking a certain vitamin, then the results are more likely to be factual than a company that is selling a vitamin and claims that taking the vitamin can produce positive effects. The company is motivated to sell their product, and the scientists are using the scientific method to prove a theory. Remember: if you find sentences that contain phrases such as “I think…”, then the statement is an opinion.

Biases
In their attempts to persuade, writers often make mistakes in their thinking patterns and writing choices. These patterns and choices are important to understand so you can make an informed decision. Every author has a point-of-view, but authors demonstrate a bias when they ignore reasonable counterarguments or distort opposing viewpoints. A bias is evident whenever the author is unfair or inaccurate in his or her presentation. Bias may be intentional or unintentional, and readers should be skeptical of the author’s argument. Remember that a biased author may still be correct; however, the author will be correct in spite of his or her bias, not because of the bias.

A stereotype is a bias applied specifically to a group or place. Stereotyping is considered to be particularly abhorrent because the practice promotes negative generalizations about people. Readers should be very cautious of authors who stereotype in their writing. These faulty assumptions typically reveal the author’s ignorance and lack of curiosity.

Denotative vs. Connotative Meaning
The denotative meaning of a word is the literal meaning. The connotative meaning goes beyond the denotative meaning to include the emotional reaction that a word may invoke. The connotative meaning often takes the denotative meaning a step further due to associations the reader makes with the denotative meaning. Readers can differentiate between the denotative and connotative meanings by first recognizing how authors use each meaning. Most non-fiction, for example, is fact-based and authors do not use flowery, figurative language. The reader can assume that the writer is using the denotative meaning of words. In fiction, the author may use the connotative meaning. Readers can determine whether the author is using the denotative or connotative meaning of a word by implementing context clues.

Context Clues
Readers of all levels will encounter words that they have either never seen or have encountered only on a limited basis. The best way to define a word in context is to look for nearby words that can assist in learning the meaning of the word. For instance, unfamiliar nouns are often accompanied by examples that provide a definition. Consider the following sentence: Dave arrived at the party in hilarious garb: a leopard-print shirt, buckskin trousers, and high heels. If a reader was unfamiliar with the meaning of garb, he or she could read the examples (i.e., a leopard-print shirt, buckskin trousers, and high heels) and quickly determine that the word means clothing. Examples will not always be this obvious. Consider this sentence: Parsley, lemon, and flowers were just a few of the items he used as garnishes. Here, the word garnishes is exemplified by parsley, lemon, and flowers. Readers who have eaten in a few restaurants will probably be able to identify a garnish as something used to decorate a plate.

Using Contrast in Context Clues
In addition to looking at the context of a passage, readers can use contrast to define an unfamiliar word in context. In many sentences, the author will not describe the unfamiliar word directly; instead, he or she will describe the opposite of the unfamiliar word. Thus, you are provided with some information that will bring you closer to defining the word. Consider the following example: Despite his intelligence, Hector’s low brow and bad posture made him look obtuse. The author writes that Hector’s appearance does not convey intelligence. Therefore, obtuse must mean unintelligent. Here is another example: Despite the horrible weather, we were beatific about our trip to Alaska. The word despite indicates that the speaker’s feelings were at odds with the weather. Since the weather is described as horrible, then beatific must mean something positive.

Substitution to Find Meaning
In some cases, there will be very few contextual clues to help a reader define the meaning of an unfamiliar word. When this happens, one strategy that readers may employ is substitution. A good reader will brainstorm some possible synonyms for the given word, and he or she will substitute these words into the sentence. If the sentence and the surrounding passage continue to make sense, then the substitution has revealed at least some information about the unfamiliar word. Consider the sentence: Frank’s admonition rang in her ears as she climbed the mountain. A reader unfamiliar with admonition might come up with some substitutions like vow, promise, advice, complaint, or compliment. All of these words make general sense of the sentence though their meanings are diverse. The process has suggested; however, that an admonition is some sort of message. The substitution strategy is rarely able to pinpoint a precise definition, but this process can be effective as a last resort.

Occasionally, you will be able to define an unfamiliar word by looking at the descriptive words in the context. Consider the following sentence: Fred dragged the recalcitrant boy kicking and screaming up the stairs. The words dragged, kicking, and screaming all suggest that the boy does not want to go up the stairs. The reader may assume that recalcitrant means something like unwilling or protesting. In this example, an unfamiliar adjective was identified.

Additionally, using description to define an unfamiliar noun is a common practice compared to unfamiliar adjectives, as in this sentence: Don’s wrinkled frown and constantly shaking fist identified him as a curmudgeon of the first order. Don is described as having a wrinkled frown and constantly shaking fist, suggesting that a curmudgeon must be a grumpy man. Contrasts do not always provide detailed information about the unfamiliar word, but they at least give the reader some clues.

Words with Multiple Meanings
When a word has more than one meaning, readers can have difficulty determining how the word is being used in a given sentence. For instance, the verb cleave, can mean either join or separate. When readers come upon this word, they will have to select the definition that makes the most sense. Consider the following sentence: Hermione’s knife cleaved the bread cleanly. Since, a knife cannot join bread together, the word must indicate separation. A slightly more difficult example would be the sentence: The birds cleaved to one another as they flew from the oak tree. Immediately, the presence of the words to one another should suggest that in this sentence cleave is being used to mean join. Discovering the intent of a word with multiple meanings requires the same tricks as defining an unknown word: look for contextual clues and evaluate the substituted words.

Synonyms and Antonyms
When you understand how words relate to each other, you will discover more in a passage. This is explained by understanding synonyms (e.g., words that mean the same thing) and antonyms (e.g., words that mean the opposite of one another). As an example, dry and arid are synonyms, and dry and wet are antonyms.

There are many pairs of words in English that can be considered synonyms, despite having slightly different definitions. For instance, the words friendly and collegial can both be used to describe a warm interpersonal relationship, and one would be correct to call them synonyms. However, collegial (kin to colleague) is often used in reference to professional or academic relationships, and friendly has no such connotation.

If the difference between the two words is too great, then they should not be called synonyms. Hot and warm are not synonyms because their meanings are too distinct. A good way to determine whether two words are synonyms is to substitute one word for the other word and verify that the meaning of the sentence has not changed. Substituting warm for hot in a sentence would convey a different meaning. Although warm and hot may seem close in meaning, warm generally means that the temperature is moderate, and hot generally means that the temperature is excessively high.

Antonyms are words with opposite meanings. Light and dark, up and down, right and left, good and bad: these are all sets of antonyms. Be careful to distinguish between antonyms and pairs of words that are simply different. Black and gray, for instance, are not antonyms because gray is not the opposite of black. Black and white, on the other hand, are antonyms.

Not every word has an antonym. For instance, many nouns do not. What would be the antonym of chair? During your exam, the questions related to antonyms are more likely to concern adjectives. You will recall that adjectives are words that describe a noun. Some common adjectives include purple, fast, skinny, and sweet. From those four adjectives, purple is the item that lacks a group of obvious antonyms.

Literary Analysis
Setting and Time Frame
A literary text has both a setting and time frame. A setting is the place in which the story as a whole is set. The time frame is the period in which the story is set. This may refer to the historical period the story takes place in or if the story takes place over a single day. Both setting and time frame are relevant to a text’s meaning because they help the reader place the story in time and space. An author uses setting and time frame to anchor a text, create a mood, and enhance its meaning. This helps a reader understand why a character acts the way he does, or why certain events in the story are important. The setting impacts the plot and character motivations, while the time frame helps place the story in chronological context.

Example
Read the following excerpt from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and analyze the relevance of setting to the text’s meaning:

We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

This excerpt from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain reveals information about the setting of the book. By understanding that the main character, Huckleberry Finn, lives on a raft, the reader can place the story on a river, in this case, the Mississippi River in the South before the Civil War. The information about the setting also gives the reader clues about the character of Huck Finn: he clearly values independence and freedom, and he likes the outdoors. The information about the setting in the quote helps the reader to better understand the rest of the text.

Theme
The theme of a passage is what the reader learns from the text or the passage. It is the lesson or moral contained in the passage. It also is a unifying idea that is used throughout the text; it can take the form of a common setting, idea, symbol, design, or recurring event. A passage can have two or more themes that convey its overall idea. The theme or themes of a passage are often based on universal themes. They can frequently be expressed using well-known sayings about life, society, or human nature, such as “Hard work pays off” or “Good triumphs over evil.” Themes are not usually stated explicitly. The reader must figure them out by carefully reading the passage. Themes are often the reason why passages are written; they give a passage unity and meaning. Themes are created through plot development. The events of a story help shape the themes of a passage.

Example
Explain why “Take care of what you care about” accurately describes the theme of the following excerpt.

Luca collected baseball cards, but he wasn’t very careful with them. He left them around the house. His dog liked to chew. Luca and his friend Bart were looking at his collection. Then they went outside. When Luca got home, he saw his dog chewing on his cards. They were ruined.

This excerpt tells the story of a boy who is careless with his baseball cards and leaves them lying around. His dog ends up chewing them and ruining them. The lesson is that if you care about something, you need to take care of it. This is the point of the story. The theme is the lesson that a story teaches. Some stories have more than one theme, but this is not really true of this excerpt. The reader needs to figure out the theme based on what happens in the story. Sometimes, as in the case of fables, the theme is stated directly in the text. However, this is not usually the case.

Conflict
A conflict is a problem to be solved. Literary plots typically include one conflict or more. Characters’ attempts to resolve conflicts drive the narrative’s forward movement. Conflict resolution is often the protagonist’s primary occupation. Physical conflicts like exploring, wars, and escapes tend to make plots most suspenseful and exciting. Emotional, mental, or moral conflicts tend to make stories more personally gratifying or rewarding for many audiences. Conflicts can be external or internal. A major type of internal conflict is some inner personal battle, or “man against himself.” Major types of external conflicts include “man against nature,” “man against man,” and “man against society.” Readers can identify conflicts in literary plots by identifying the protagonist and antagonist and asking why they conflict, what events develop the conflict, where the climax occurs, and how they identify with the characters.

Read the following paragraph and discuss the type of conflict present:

Timothy was shocked out of sleep by the appearance of a bear just outside his tent. After panicking for a moment, he remembered some advice he had read in preparation for this trip: he should make noise so the bear would not be startled. As Timothy started to hum and sing, the bear wandered away.

There are three main types of conflict in literature: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus self. This paragraph is an example of man versus nature. Timothy is in conflict with the bear. Even though no physical conflict like an attack exists, Timothy is pitted against the bear. Timothy uses his knowledge to “defeat” the bear and keep himself safe. The solution to the conflict is that Timothy makes noise, the bear wanders away, and Timothy is safe.

Conflict Resolution
The way the conflict is resolved depends on the type of conflict. The plot of any book starts with the lead up to the conflict, then the conflict itself, and finally the solution, or resolution, to the conflict. In man versus man conflicts, the conflict is often resolved by two parties coming to some sort of agreement or by one party triumphing over the other party. In man versus nature conflicts, the conflict is often resolved by man coming to some realization about some aspect of nature. In man versus self conflicts, the conflict is often resolved by the character growing or coming to an understanding about part of himself.

Syntax and Word Choice
Authors use words and syntax, or sentence structure, to make their texts unique, convey their own writing style, and sometimes to make a point or emphasis. They know that word choice and syntax contribute to the reader’s understanding of the text as well as to the tone and mood of a text.

Allusion
An allusion is an uncited but recognizable reference to something else. Authors use language to make allusions to places, events, artwork, and other books in order to make their own text richer. For example, an author may allude to a very important text in order to make his own text seem more important. Martin Luther King, Jr. started his “I Have a Dream” speech by saying “Five score years ago…” This is a clear allusion to President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and served to remind people of the significance of the event. An author may allude to a place to ground his text or make a cultural reference to make readers feel included. There are many reasons that authors make allusions.

Comic Relief
Comic relief is the use of comedy by an author to break up a dramatic or tragic scene and infuse it with a bit of lightheartedness. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, two gravediggers digging the grave for Ophelia share a joke while they work. The death and burial of Ophelia are tragic moments that directly follow each other. Shakespeare uses an instance of comedy to break up the tragedy and give his audience a bit of a break from the tragic drama. Authors sometimes use comic relief so that their work will be less depressing; other times they use it to create irony or contrast between the darkness of the situation and the lightness of the joke. Often, authors will use comedy to parallel what is happening in the tragic scenes.

Mood and Tone
Mood is a story’s atmosphere, or the feelings the reader gets from reading it. The way authors set the mood in writing is comparable to the way filmmakers use music to set the mood in movies. Instead of music, though, writers judiciously select descriptive words to evoke certain moods. The mood of a work may convey joy, anger, bitterness, hope, gloom, fear, apprehension, or any other emotion the author wants the reader to feel. In addition to vocabulary choices, authors also use figurative expressions, particular sentence structures, and choices of diction that project and reinforce the moods they want to create. Whereas mood is the reader’s emotions evoked by reading what is written, tone is the emotions and attitudes of the writer that she or he expresses in the writing. Authors use the same literary techniques to establish tone as they do to establish mood. An author may use a humorous tone, an angry or sad tone, a sentimental or unsentimental tone, or something else entirely.

Analysis of Character Development
To understand the meaning of a story, it is vital to understand the characters as the author describes them. We can look for contradictions in what a character thinks, says, and does. We can notice whether the author’s observations about a character differ from what other characters in the story say about that character. A character may be dynamic (changing significantly during the story) or static (remaining the same from beginning to end). Characters may be two-dimensional, not fully developed, or may be well developed with characteristics that stand out vividly. Characters may also symbolize universal properties. Additionally, readers can compare and contrast characters to analyze how they were developed.

Dialogue
Effectively written dialogue serves at least one but usually several purposes. It advances the story and moves the plot. It develops the characters. It sheds light on the work’s theme or meaning. It can, often subtly, account for the passage of time not otherwise indicated. It can alter the direction that the plot is taking, typically by introducing some new conflict or changing existing ones. Dialogue can establish a work’s narrative voice and the characters’ voices and set the tone of the story or of particular characters. When fictional characters display enlightenment or realization, dialogue can give readers an understanding of what those characters have discovered and how. Dialogue can illuminate the motivations and wishes of the story’s characters. By using consistent thoughts and syntax, dialogue can support character development. Skillfully created, it can also represent real-life speech rhythms in written form. Via conflicts and ensuing action, dialogue also provides drama.

Dialogue in Fiction
In fictional works, effectively written dialogue does more than just break up or interrupt sections of narrative. While dialogue may supply exposition for readers, it must nonetheless be believable. Dialogue should be dynamic, not static, and it should not resemble regular prose. Authors should not use dialogue to write clever similes or metaphors, or to inject their own opinions. Nor should they use dialogue at all when narrative would be better. Most importantly, dialogue should not slow the plot movement. Dialogue must seem natural, which means careful construction of phrases rather than actually duplicating natural speech, which does not necessarily translate well to the written word. Finally, all dialogue must be pertinent to the story rather than just added conversation.

First-Person Narration
First-person narratives let narrators express inner feelings and thoughts, especially when the narrator is the protagonist as Lemuel Gulliver is in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The narrator may be a close friend of the protagonist, like Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Or the narrator can be less involved with the main characters and plot, like Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. When a narrator reports others’ narratives secondhand or more, she or he is a “frame narrator,” like the nameless narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Mr. Lockwood in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. First-person plural is unusual but can be effective, as in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot; William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily; Maxim Gorky’s Twenty-Six Men and a Girl; or Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Author Kurt Vonnegut is the first-person narrator in his semi-autobiographical novel Timequake. Also unusual, but effective, is a first-person omniscient (rather than the more common third-person omniscient) narrator, like Death in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and the ghost in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Second-Person Narration
While second-person address is very commonplace in popular song lyrics, it is the least used form of narrative voice in literary works. Popular serial books of the 1980s like Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure employed second-person narratives. In some cases, a narrative combines both second-person and first-person voices, speaking of “you” and “I.” This can draw readers into the story, and it can also enable the authors to compare directly “your” and “my” feelings, thoughts, and actions. When the narrator is also a character in the story, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” or Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, the narrative is better defined as first-person despite its also addressing “you.”

Third-Person Narration
Narration in the third person is the most prevalent type, as it allows authors the most flexibility. It is so common that readers simply assume without needing to be informed that the narrator is not a character in, or involved in the story. Third-person singular is used more frequently than third-person plural, though some authors have also effectively used plural. However, both singular and plural are most often included in stories according to which characters are being described. The third-person narrator may be either objective or subjective, and either omniscient or limited. Objective third-person narration does not include what the characters described are thinking or feeling, while subjective third-person narration does. The third-person omniscient narrator knows everything about all characters, including their thoughts and emotions, and all related places, times, and events, whereas the third-person limited narrator may know everything about a particular character of focus, but is limited to that character; in other words, the narrator cannot speak about anything that character does not know.

Alternating-Person Narration
Although authors more commonly write stories from one point of view, there are also instances wherein they alternate the narrative voice within the same book. For example, they may sometimes use an omniscient third-person narrator and a more intimate first-person narrator at other times. In J. K. Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels, she often writes in a third-person limited narrative, but sometimes changes to narration by characters other than protagonist Harry Potter. George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire changes the point of view to coincide with divisions between chapters. The same technique is used by Erin Hunter (a pseudonym for several authors of the Warriors, Seekers, and Survivors book series). Authors using first-person narrative sometimes switch to third-person to describe significant action scenes, especially those where the narrator was absent or uninvolved, as Barbara Kingsolver does in her novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Theme and Plot
Themes in Literature
When we read parables, their themes are the lessons they aim to teach. When we read fables, the moral of each story is its theme. When we read fictional works, the authors’ perspectives regarding life and human behavior are their themes. Unlike in parables and fables, usually themes in literary fiction are not meant to preach or teach the readers a lesson. Hence themes in fiction are not as explicit as they are in parables or fables. Instead they are implicit, and the reader only infers them. By analyzing the fictional characters through thinking about their actions and behavior, understanding the setting of the story, and reflecting on how its plot develops, the reader comes to infer the main theme of the work. When writers succeed, they communicate with their readers such that common ground is established between author and audience. While a reader’s individual experience may differ in its details from the author’s written story, both may share universal underlying truths which allow author and audience to connect.

Determining Theme
In well-crafted literature, theme, structure, and plot are interdependent and inextricable: each element informs and reflects the others. The structure of a work is how it is organized. The theme is the central idea or meaning found in it. The plot is what happens in the story. (Plots can be physical actions or mental processes—e.g., Marcel Proust.) Titles can also inform us of a work’s theme. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s title “The Tell-Tale Heart” informs us of its theme of guilt before we even read about the repeated heartbeat the protagonist begins hearing immediately before and constantly after committing and hiding a murder. Repetitive patterns of events or behaviors also give clues to themes. The same is true of symbols: in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for Jay Gatsby the green light at the end of the dock symbolizes Daisy Buchanan and his own dreams for the future. More generally, it symbolizes the American Dream, and narrator Nick Carraway explicitly compares it to early settlers’ sight of America rising from the ocean.

Thematic Development
Theme in The Great Gatsby
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed 1920s America as greedy, cynical, and rife with moral decay. Jay Gatsby’s lavish weekly parties symbolize the reckless excesses of the Jazz Age. The growth of bootlegging and organized crime in reaction to Prohibition is symbolized by the character of Meyer Wolfsheim and by Gatsby’s own ill-gotten wealth. Fitzgerald symbolized social divisions using geography: the “old money” aristocrats like the Buchanans lived on East Egg, while the “new money” bourgeois like Gatsby lived on West Egg. Fitzgerald also used weather, as many authors have, to reinforce narrative and emotional tones in the novel. Just as in Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare set the confrontation of Tybalt and Mercutio and its deadly consequences on the hottest summer day under a burning sun, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald did the same with Tom Wilson’s deadly confrontation with Gatsby. Both works are ostensible love stories carrying socially critical themes about the destructiveness of pointless and misguided behaviors—family feuds in the former, pursuit of money in the latter.

Theme in Les Misérables
In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, the overall metamorphosis of protagonist Jean Valjean from a cynical ex-convict into a noble benefactor demonstrates Hugo’s theme of the importance of love and compassion for others. Hugo also reflects this in more specific plot events. For example, Valjean’s love for Cosette sustains him through many difficult periods and trying events. Hugo illustrates how love and compassion for others beget the same in them: Bishop Myriel’s kindness to Valjean eventually inspires him to become honest. Years later, Valjean, as M. Madeleine, has rescued Fauchelevent from under a fallen carriage, Fauchelevent returns the compassionate act by giving Valjean sanctuary in the convent. M. Myriel’s kindness also ultimately enables Valjean to rescue Cosette from the Thénardiers. Receiving Valjean’s father-like love enables Cosette to fall in love with and marry Marius. And the love between Cosette and Marius enables the couple to forgive Valjean for his past crimes when they are revealed.

Theme in “The Tell-Tale Heart”
In one of his shortest stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe used economy of language to emphasize the murderer-narrator’s obsessive focus on bare details like the victim’s cataract-milky eye, the sound of a heartbeat, and insistence he is sane. The narrator begins by denying he is crazy, even citing his extreme agitation as proof of sanity. Contradiction is then extended: the narrator loves the old man, yet kills him. His motives are irrational—not greed or revenge, but to relieve the victim of his “evil eye.” Because “eye” and “I” are homonyms, readers may infer that eye/I symbolizes the old man’s identity, contradicting the killer’s delusion that he can separate them. The narrator distances himself from the old man by perceiving his eye as separate, and dismembering his dead body. This backfires in another body part when he imagines the victim’s heartbeat, which is really his own. Guilty and paranoid, he gives himself away. Poe predated Freud in exploring the paradox of killing those we love and the concept of projecting our own processes onto others.

Theme in the Works of William Faulkner and Charles Dickens
William Faulkner contrasts the traditions of the antebellum South with the rapid changes of post-Civil War industrialization in his short story “A Rose for Emily.” Living inside the isolated world of her house, Emily Grierson denies the reality of modern progress. Contradictorily, she is both a testament to time-honored history and a mysterious, eccentric, unfathomable burden. Faulkner portrays her with deathlike imagery even in life, comparing her to a drowned woman and referring to her skeleton. Emily symbolizes the Old South; as her social status is degraded, so is the antebellum social order. Like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Emily preserves her bridal bedroom, denying change and time’s passage. Emily tries to control death through denial, shown in her necrophilia with her father’s corpse and her killing of Homer Barron to stop him from leaving her, then also denying his death. Faulkner uses the motif of dust throughout to represent not only the decay of Emily, her house, and Old Southern traditions, but also how her secrets are obscured from others.

Theme in Moby-Dick
The great White Whale in Moby-Dick plays various roles to different characters. In Captain Ahab’s obsessive, monomaniacal quest to kill it, the whale represents all evil, and Ahab believes it his duty and destiny to rid the world of it. Ishmael attempts through multiple scientific disciplines to understand the whale objectively, but fails—it is hidden underwater and mysterious to humans—reinforcing Melville’s theme that humans can never know everything; here the whale represents the unknowable. Melville reverses white’s usual connotation of purity in Ishmael’s dread of white, associated with crashing waves, polar animals, albinos—all frightening and unnatural. White is often viewed as an absence of color, yet white light is the sum total of all colors in the spectrum. In the same way, white can signify both absence of meaning, and totality of meaning incomprehensible to humans. As a creature of nature, the whale also symbolizes how 19th-century white men’s exploitative expansionistic actions were destroying the natural environment.

Theme in The Old Man and the Sea
Because of the old fisherman Santiago’s struggle to capture a giant marlin, some people characterize Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as telling of man against nature. However, it can more properly be interpreted as telling of man’s role as part of nature. Both man and fish are portrayed as brave, proud, and honorable. In Hemingway’s world, all creatures, including humans, must either kill or be killed. Santiago reflects, “man can be destroyed but not defeated,” following this principle in his life. As heroes are often created through their own deaths, Hemingway seems to believe that while being destroyed is inevitable, destruction enables living beings to transcend it by fighting bravely with honor and dignity. Hemingway echoes Romantic poet John Keats’ contention that only immediately before death can we understand beauty as it is about to be destroyed. He also echoes ancient Greek and Roman myths and the Old Testament with the tragic flaw of overweening pride or overreaching. Like Icarus, Prometheus, and Adam and Eve, the old man “went out too far.”

Universal Themes
The Old Testament book of Genesis, the Quran, and the Epic of Gilgamesh all contain flood stories. Versions differ somewhat: Genesis describes a worldwide flood, attributing it to God’s decision that mankind, his creation, had become incontrovertibly wicked in spirit and must be destroyed for the world to start anew. The Quran describes the flood as regional, caused by Allah after sending Nuh (notice the similarity in name to Noah) as a messenger to his people to cease their evil. The Quran stipulates that Allah only destroys those who deny or ignore messages from his messengers. Marked similarities also exist: in the Gilgamesh poems Utnapishtim, like Noah, is instructed to build a ship to survive the flood. Both men send out birds afterward as tests, and both include doves and a raven, though with different outcomes. Historians and archeologists believe a Middle Eastern tidal wave was a real basis for these stories. However, their universal themes remain the same: the flood was seen as God’s way of wiping out humans whose behavior had become ungodly.

Theme of Overreaching
A popular theme throughout literature is the human trait of reaching too far or presuming too much. In Greek mythology, Daedalus constructed wings of feathers and wax that men might fly like birds. He permitted his son Icarus to try them, but cautioned the boy not to fly too close to the sun. The impetuous youth (in what psychologist David Elkind later named adolescence’s myth of invincibility) ignored this, flying too close to the sun: the wax melted, the wings disintegrated, and Icarus fell into the sea and perished. In the Old Testament, God warned Adam and Eve not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Because they ignored this command, they were banished from Eden’s eternal perfection, condemning them to mortality and suffering. The Romans were themselves examples of overreaching in their conquest and assimilation of most of the then-known world and ultimate demise. In Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist sells his soul to the Devil for unlimited knowledge and success, ultimately leading to his own tragic end.

Story Vs. Discourse
In terms of plot, “story” is the characters, places, and events originating in the author’s mind, while “discourse” is how the author arranges and sequences events—which may be chronological or not. Story is imaginary; discourse is words on the page. Discourse allows story to be told in different ways. One element of plot structure is relating events differently from the order in which they occurred. This is easily done with cause-and-effect; for example, in the sentence, “He died following a long illness,” we know the illness preceded the death, but the death precedes the illness in words. In Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour” (1894), she tells some of the events out of chronological order, which has the effect of amplifying the surprise of the ending for the reader. Another element of plot structure is selection. Chopin omits some details, such as Mr. Mallard’s trip home; this allows readers to be as surprised at his arrival as Mrs. Mallard is.

Plot and Meaning
Novelist E. M. Forster has made the distinction between story as relating a series of events, such as a king dying and then his queen dying, versus plot as establishing motivations for actions and causes for events, such as a king dying and then his queen dying from grief over his death. Thus, plot fulfills the function of helping readers understand cause-and-effect in events and underlying motivations in characters’ actions, which in turn helps them understand life. This affects a work’s meaning by supporting its ability to explain why things happen, why people do things, and ultimately the meaning of life. Some authors find that while story events convey meaning, they do not tell readers there is any one meaning in life or way of living, but rather are mental experiments with various meanings, enabling readers to explore. Hence stories may not necessarily be constructed to impose one definitive meaning, but rather to find some shape, direction, and meaning within otherwise random events.

Classic Analysis of Plot Structure
In Poetics, Aristotle defined plot as “the arrangement of the incidents.” He meant not the story, but how it is structured for presentation. In tragedies, Aristotle found results driven by chains of cause-and-effect preferable to those driven by the protagonist’s personality/character. He identified “unity of action” as necessary for a plot’s wholeness; its events must be internally connected, not episodic or relying on deus ex machina or other external intervention. A plot must have a beginning, middle, and end. Gustav Freytag adapted Aristotle’s ideas into his Triangle/Pyramid (1863). The beginning, today called the exposition/incentive/inciting moment, emphasizes causes and de-emphasizes effects. Aristotle called the ensuing cause-and-effect desis, or tying up, today called complications which occur during the rising action. These culminate in a crisis or climax, Aristotle’s peripateia. This occurs at the plot’s middle, where cause and effect are both emphasized. The falling action, which Aristotle called the lusis or unraveling, is today called the dénouement. The resolution comes at the catastrophe, outcome, or end, when causes are emphasized and effects de-emphasized.

Analysis of Plot Structures Through Recurring Patterns
Authors of fiction select characters, places, and events from their imaginations and arrange them in ways that will affect their readers. One way to analyze plot structure is to compare and contrast different events in a story. For example, in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” a very simple but key pattern of repetition is the husband’s leaving and then returning. Such patterns fulfill the symmetrical aspect that Aristotle said was required of sound plot structure. In James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator is Sonny’s brother. In an encounter with one of Sonny’s old friends early in the story, the brother initially disregards his communication. In a subsequent flashback, Baldwin informs us that this was the same way he had treated Sonny. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” a pattern is created by the protagonist’s recurrent efforts not to go farther into the wood. In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” patterns are also created by repetition such as Bartleby’s repeated refusals and the history of barn-burning episodes, respectively.

Drawing Inferences
Making Inferences
An inference is a conclusion that a reader can make based on the facts and other information in a passage or a story. An inference is based both on what is found in a passage or a story and what is known from personal experience. For instance, a story may say that a character is frightened and that he can hear the sounds of howling in the distance. Based on both what is in the text and personal knowledge, it might be a logical conclusion that the character is frightened because he hears the sound of wolves. A good inference is supported by the information in a passage. Inferences are different from explicit information, which is clearly stated in a passage. Inferences are not stated in a passage. A reader must put the information together to come up with a logical conclusion.

Read the excerpt and decide why Jana finally relaxed.

Jana loved her job, but the work was very demanding. She had trouble relaxing. She called a friend, but she still thought about work. She ordered a pizza, but eating it did not help. Then her kitten jumped on her lap and began to purr. Jana leaned back and began to hum a little tune. She felt better.

You can draw the conclusion that Jana relaxes because her kitten jumped on her lap. The kitten purred, and Jana leaned back and hummed a tune. Then she felt better. The excerpt does not explicitly say that this is the reason why she was able to relax. The text leaves the matter unclear, but the reader can infer or make a “best guess” that this is the reason she is relaxing. This is a logical conclusion based on the information in the passage. It is the best conclusion a reader can make based on the information he or she has read. Inferences are based on the information in a passage, but they are not directly stated in the passage.

Test-taking tip: While being tested on your ability to make correct inferences, you must look for contextual clues. An answer can be true but not correct. The contextual clues will help you find the answer that is the best answer out of the given choices. Be careful in your reading to understand the context in which a phrase is stated. When asked for the implied meaning of a statement made in the passage, you should immediately locate the statement and read the context in which the statement was made. Also, look for an answer choice that has a similar phrase to the statement in question.

Making Predictions
When reading a good passage, readers are moved to engage actively in the text. One part of being an active reader involves making predictions. A prediction is a guess about what will happen next. Readers constantly make predictions based on what they have read and what they already know. Consider the following sentence: Staring at the computer screen in shock, Kim blindly reached over for the brimming glass of water on the shelf to her side. The sentence suggests that Kim is agitated, and that she is not looking at the glass that she is going to pick up. So, a reader might predict that Kim is going to knock over the glass. Of course, not every prediction will be accurate: perhaps Kim will pick the glass up cleanly. Nevertheless, the author has certainly created the expectation that the water might be spilled. Predictions are always subject to revision as the reader acquires more information.

Test-taking tip: To respond to questions requiring future predictions, your answers should be based on evidence of past or present behavior.

Drawing Conclusions
A common type of inference that a reader has to make is drawing a conclusion. The reader makes this conclusion based on the information provided within a text. Certain facts are included to help a reader come to a specific conclusion. For example, a story may open with a man trudging through the snow on a cold winter day, dragging a sled behind him. The reader can logically infer from the setting of the story that the man is wearing heavy winter clothes in order to stay warm. Information is implied based on the setting of a story, which is why setting is an important element of the text. If the same man in the example was trudging down a beach on a hot summer day, dragging a surf board behind him, the reader would assume that the man is not wearing heavy clothes. The reader makes inferences based on their own experiences and the information presented to them in the story.

Test-taking tip: When asked for a conclusion that may be drawn, look for critical “hedge” phrases, such as likely, may, can, will often, among many others. When you are being tested on this knowledge, remember the question that writers insert into these hedge phrases to cover every possibility. Often an answer will be wrong simply because there is no room for exception. Extreme positive or negative answers (such as always or never) are usually not correct. The reader should not use any outside knowledge that is not gathered directly or reasonably inferred from the passage. Correct answers can be derived straight from the passage.

Example
Read the following sentence and draw a conclusion based upon the information presented:

"You know the reason Mother proposed not having any presents this Christmas was because it is going to be a hard winter for everyone; and she thinks we ought not to spend money for pleasure, when our men are suffering so in the army.” (from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott)

Based on the information in the sentence, the reader can conclude, or infer, that the men are away at war while the women are still at home. The pronoun our gives a clue to the reader that the character is speaking about men she knows. In addition, the reader can assume that the character is speaking to a brother or sister, since the term Mother is used by the character while speaking to another person. The reader can also come to the conclusion that the characters celebrate Christmas, since it is mentioned in the context of the sentence. In the sentence, the Mother is presented as an unselfish character who is opinionated and thinks about the wellbeing of other people.

Comparing Two Stories
When presented with two different stories, there will be similarities and differences between the two. A reader needs to make a list or other graphic organizer of the points presented in each story. Once the reader has written down the main point and supporting points for each story, the two sets of ideas can be compared. The reader can then present each idea and show how it is the same or different in the other story. This is called comparing and contrasting ideas.

The reader can compare ideas by stating, for example: “In Story 1, the author believes that humankind will one day land on Mars, whereas in Story 2, the author believes that Mars is too far away for humans to ever step foot on.” Note that the two viewpoints are different in each story that the reader is comparing. A reader may state that: “Both stories discussed the likelihood of humankind landing on Mars.” This statement shows how the viewpoint presented in both stories is based on the same topic, rather than how each viewpoint is different. The reader will complete a comparison of two stories with a conclusion.

Literal and Figurative Language Use
Literal and Figurative Meaning
When language is used literally, the words mean exactly what they say and nothing more. When language is used figuratively, the words mean something more and/or other than what they say. For example, “The weeping willow tree has long, trailing branches and leaves” is a literal description. But “The weeping willow tree looks as if it is bending over and crying” is a figurative description—specifically, a simile or stated comparison. Another figurative language form is metaphor, or an implied comparison. A good example is the metaphor of a city, state, or city-state as a ship, and its governance as sailing that ship. Ancient Greek lyrical poet Alcaeus is credited with first using this metaphor, and ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus then used it in Seven Against Thebes, and then Plato used it in the Republic. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later famously referred to it in his poem, “O Ship of State” (1850), which has an extended metaphor with numerous nautical references throughout.

Figurative Language
Figurative language extends past the literal meanings of words. It offers readers new insight into the people, things, events, and subjects covered in a work of literature. Figurative language also enables readers to feel they are sharing the authors’ experiences. It can stimulate the reader’s senses, make comparisons that readers find intriguing or even startling, and enable readers to view the world in different ways. Seven specific types of figurative language include: alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, imagery, similes, metaphors, and hyperbole.

Alliteration and Onomatopoeia
Alliteration is using a series of words containing the same sounds—assonance with vowels, and consonance with consonants. Onomatopoeia uses words imitating the sounds of things they name or describe. For example, in his poem “Come Down, O Maid,” Alfred Tennyson writes of “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees.” The word “moan” sounds like some sounds doves make, “murmuring” represents the sounds of bees buzzing. Onomatopoeia also includes words that are simply meant to represent sounds, such as “meow,” “kaboom,” and “whoosh.”

Personification
Personification is describing a thing or animal as a person. Imagery is description using sensory terms that create mental images for the reader of how people, animals, or things look, sound, feel, taste, and/or smell. Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Eagle” uses all of these types of figurative language: “He clasps the crag with crooked hands.” Tennyson used alliteration, repeating /k/ and /kr/ sounds. These hard-sounding consonants reinforce the imagery giving visual and tactile impressions of the eagle.

Tennyson also used personification, describing a bird as “he” and calling its talons “hands.” In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare uses personification to describe the changing of the seasons: “When well-appareled April on the heel / Of limping winter treads....” Here “April” and “winter” are given the human characteristics of walking, dressing, and aging.

Similes and Metaphors
Similes are stated comparisons using “like” or “as.” Similes can be used to stimulate readers’ imaginations and appeal to their senses. By comparing fictional characters to well-known objects or experiences, the reader can better relate to them. William Wordsworth’s poem about “Daffodils” begins, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” This simile compares his loneliness to that of a cloud. It is also personification, giving a cloud the human quality loneliness. In his novel Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad writes in Chapter 33, “I would have given anything for the power to soothe her frail soul, tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage.” Conrad uses the word “like” to compare the girl’s soul to a small bird. His description of the bird beating at the cage shows the similar helplessness of the girl’s soul to gain freedom.

Metaphor is an implied comparison that does not use “like” or “as” the way a simile does. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow echoes the ancient Greeks in “O Ship of State”: the metaphor compares the state and its government to a nautical ship and its sailing.

Ted Hughes’ Animal Metaphors
Hughes frequently used animal metaphors in his poetry. In “The Thought Fox,” a model of concise, structured beauty, Hughes characterizes the poet’s creative process with succinct, striking imagery of an idea entering his head like a wild fox. Repeating “loneliness” in the first two stanzas emphasizes the poet’s lonely work: “Something else is alive / Beside the clock’s loneliness.” He treats an idea’s arrival as separate from himself. Three stanzas detail in vivid images a fox’s approach from the outside winter forest at starless midnight —its nose, “Cold, delicately” touching twigs and leaves; “neat” paw prints in snow; “bold” body; brilliant green eyes; and self-contained, focused progress—“Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,” he metaphorically depicts poetic inspiration as the fox’s physical entry into “the dark hole of the head.” Hughes ends by summarizing his vision of poet as an interior, passive idea recipient, with the outside world unchanged: “The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.”

Literary Examples of Metaphor
A metaphor is an implied comparison, i.e. it compares something to something else without using “like”, “as”, or other comparative words. For example, in “The Tyger” (1794), William Blake writes, “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night.” Blake compares the tiger to a flame not by saying it is like a fire, but by simply describing it as “burning.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “O Ship of State” (1850) uses an extended metaphor by referring consistently throughout the entire poem to the state, union, or republic as a seagoing vessel, referring to its keel, mast, sail, rope, anchors, and to its braving waves, rocks, gale, tempest, and “false lights on the shore”. Within the extended metaphor, Wordsworth uses a specific metaphor: “the anchors of thy hope!”

Hyperbole
Hyperbole is excessive exaggeration used for humor or emphasis rather than for literal meaning. For example, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee narrated, “People moved slowly then. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.” This was not literally true; Lee exaggerates the scarcity of these things for emphasis. In “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Mark Twain wrote, “I... could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far.” This is not literal, but makes his description vivid and funny. In his poem “As I Walked Out One Evening”, W. H. Auden wrote, “I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you / Till China and Africa meet, / And the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street.” He used things not literally possible to emphasize the duration of his love.

Literary Irony
In literature, irony demonstrates the opposite of what is said or done. The three types are verbal irony, situational irony, and dramatic irony. Verbal irony uses words opposite to the meaning. Sarcasm may use verbal irony. An everyday example is describing something confusing as “clear as mud.” In his 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters, author/director/actor Woody Allen says to his character’s date, “I had a great evening; it was like the Nuremburg Trials.” Notice these employ similes. In situational irony, what happens contrasts with what was expected. In dramatic irony, narrative informs audiences of more than its characters know. O. Henry’s short story The Gift of the Magi uses situational irony: a husband and wife each sacrifice their most prized possession to buy each other a Christmas present. The irony is that she sells her long hair to buy him a watch fob, while he sells his heirloom pocket-watch to buy her the jeweled combs for her hair she had long wanted; in the end, neither of them can use their gifts.

Literary Terminology
In works of prose such as novels, a group of connected sentences covering one main topic is termed a paragraph. In works of poetry, a group of verses similarly connected is called a stanza. In drama, when early works used verse, these were also divided into stanzas or couplets. Drama evolved to use predominantly prose. Overall, whether prose or verse, the conversation in a play is called dialogue. Large sections of dialogue spoken by one actor are called soliloquies or monologues. Dialogue that informs audiences but is unheard by other characters is called an aside. Novels and plays share certain common elements, such as characters (the people in the story), plot (the action of the story), climax (when action and/or dramatic tension reaches its highest point), and denouement (the resolution following the climax). Sections dividing novels are called chapters, while sections of plays are called acts. Subsections of plays’ acts are called scenes. Novel chapters are usually not subdivided, although some novels have larger sections divided into groups of chapters.

Poetry
Unlike prose, which traditionally (except in forms like stream of consciousness) consists of complete sentences connected into paragraphs, poetry is written in verses. These may form complete sentences, clauses, or phrases. Poetry may be written with or without rhyme. It can be metered, following a particular rhythmic pattern such as iambic, dactylic, spondaic, trochaic, or anapestic, or may be without regular meter. The terms iamb and trochee, among others, identify stressed and unstressed syllables in each verse. Meter is also described by the number of beats or stressed syllables per verse: dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), and so forth. Using the symbol ᴗ to denote unstressed and / to denote stressed syllables, iambic = ᴗ/; trochaic = /ᴗ; spondaic =//; dactylic =/ᴗᴗ; anapestic =ᴗᴗ/. Rhyme schemes identify which lines rhyme, such as ABAB, ABCA, AABA, and so on. Poetry with neither rhyme nor meter is called free verse. Poems may be in free verse, metered but unrhymed, rhymed but without meter, or using both rhyme and meter. In English, the most common meter is iambic pentameter. Unrhymed iambic pentameter is called blank verse.

Literary Theories and Criticism and Interpretation
Literary theory gives a rationale for the literary subject matter of criticism, and also for the process of interpreting literature. For example, Aristotle’s Poetics’ requirement of unity underlies any discussion of unity in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Postcolonial theory, assuming historical racism and exploitation, informs Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe’s contention that in Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad does not portray Africans with complete humanity. Gender and feminist theories support critics’ interpretation of Edna Pontellier’s drowning at the climax of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899) as suicide. Until the 19th century, critics largely believed literature referenced objective reality, holding “a mirror up to nature” as William Shakespeare wrote. Twentieth-century Structuralism and New Historicism were predated and influenced by non-traditional, historicized, cross-cultural comparative interpretations of biblical text in 19th-century German “higher criticism.” Literary critic Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve maintained that biography could completely explain literature; contrarily, Marcel Proust demonstrated in narrative that art completely transformed biography. A profound 19th-century influence on literary theory was Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that facts must be interpreted to become facts.

World Literature
Historical Background for English Literature
The ancient Greek Athenian elite were highly educated and developed philosophies and principles for creating poetry and drama. During the Roman Empire, the Romans assimilated and adapted the culture of the Greeks they conquered into their own society. For example, the gods of Roman mythology were essentially the same as in Greek myth, only renamed in Latin. However, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the many European countries formerly united under Roman rule became fragmented. There followed a 1,000-year period of general public ignorance and illiteracy—called the Dark Ages as well as the Middle Ages. Only the Church remained a bastion of literacy: monks and priests laboriously copied manuscripts one at a time by hand. Johannes Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of the movable-type printing press changed everything: multiple copies of books could be printed quickly. This enabled a public return to literacy, leading to the Renaissance, or “rebirth”—reviving access and interest for Greek and Roman classics, and generating a creative explosion in all arts.

Medieval Poetry
The medieval time period was heavily influenced by Greek and Latin Stoic philosophies. Medieval Christians appreciated Greek and Latin Stoic philosophies for emphasis of spiritual virtues rather than material. Pagan stoic values were often adapted to Christian beliefs, and these were incorporated into early English literature.

Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), called the “Father of English Literature,” chiefly wrote long narrative poems, including The Book of the Duchess, Anelida and Arcite, The House of Fame, The Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales. Its historical and cultural context is life during the Middle Ages, representing a cross-section of society—tradespeople, professionals, nobility, clergy, and housewives, among others—and religious pilgrimages, a common practice of the time. Its literary context is a frame-tale, a story within a story. Chaucer described a varied group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, taking turns telling stories to amuse each other. Tales encompass a broad range of subjects: bawdy comedy, chivalry, romance, and religion.

These include: The Knight’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale, The Cook’s Tale, The Man of Law’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Friar’s Tale, The Summoner’s Tale, The Clerk’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale, The Squire’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale, The Physician’s Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale, and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

The Parlement of Foules
In the brief preface to his poem “The Parlement of Foules,” Chaucer refers to classic Roman author Cicero’s “The Dream of Scipio,” a dream-vision dialogue reflecting Stoic philosophy. Chaucer takes Cicero’s broad scope of macrocosm (viewing the universe as a whole) and narrows it to a microcosm (individual focus) as he explores themes of order, disorder, and the role of humanity in nature. By using animals as characters, he is able to both parody and probe human nature for the reader.

Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) had an immeasurable influence on the development of English literature. Both his writing style and thought process were highly original. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Browne with coining over 100 new words (and quotes him in over 3,000 other entries), such as approximate, literary, and ultimate. His creativity and vision have inspired other authors over the past four centuries and were instrumental in developing much of the vocabulary used in today’s prose and poetry. In 1671 he was knighted by Charles II in recognition of his accomplishments, which continue to affect literature today.

Metaphysical Poets
Dr. Samuel Johnson, a famous 18th-century figure, who wrote philosophy, poetry, and authoritative essays on literature, coined the term “Metaphysical Poets” to describe a number of mainly 17th-century lyric poets who shared certain elements of content and style in common. The poets included John Donne (considered the founder of the Metaphysical Poets), George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and Henry Vaughan. These poets encouraged readers to see the world from new and unaccustomed perspectives by shocking and surprising them with paradox; contradictory imagery; original syntax; combinations of religious, philosophical, and artistic images; subtle argumentation; and extended metaphors called conceits. Unlike their contemporaries, they did not allude to classical mythology or nature imagery in their poetry, but to current geographical and scientific discoveries. Some, like Donne, showed Neo-Platonist influences—like the idea that a lover’s beauty reflected Eternity’s perfect beauty. They were called metaphysical for their transcendence—Donne in particular—of typical 17th-century rationalism’s hierarchical organization through their adventurous exploration of religion, ideas, emotions, and language.

Romanticism
The height of the Romantic movement occurred in the first half of the 19th century. It identified with and gained momentum from the French Revolution (1789) against the political and social standards of the aristocracy and its overthrowing of them. Romanticism was also part of the Counter-Enlightenment, backlash against the Enlightenment’s insistence on rationalism, scientific treatment of nature, and denial of emotionalism. Though expressed most overtly in the creative arts, Romanticism also affected politics, historiography, natural sciences, and education. Though often associated with radical, progressive, and liberal politics, it also included conservatism, especially in its influences on increased nationalism in many countries. The Romantics championed individual heroes, artists, and pioneers; freedom of expression; the exotic; and the power of the individual imagination. American authors Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Laurence Sterne in England, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany were included among well-known Romantic authors. The six major English Romantic poets were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the earliest and foremost English Romantic poets. He was also an artist and printmaker. In addition to his brilliant poetry, he produced paintings, drawings, and engravings, impressive for their technical expertise, artistic beauty, and spiritual subject matter. Because he held many idiosyncratic opinions, and moreover because he was subject to visions, reporting that he saw angels in the trees and other unusual claims, Blake was thought crazy by many others during his life. His work’s creative, expressive character, and its mystical and philosophical elements, led people to consider him both precursor to and member of Romanticism, and a singular, original, unclassifiable artist at the same time. Blake illustrated most of his poetry with his own hand-colored, illuminated printing. His best-known poetry includes Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.

William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was instrumental in establishing Romanticism when he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaboratively published Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is considered a manifesto of English Romantic literary theory and criticism. In it, Wordsworth described the elements of a new kind of poetry, which he characterized as using “real language of men” rather than traditional 18th-century poetic style. In this Preface he also defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [which] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Lyrical Ballads included the famous works “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, and “Tintern Abbey” by Wordsworth. His semi-autobiographical poem, known during his life as “the poem to Coleridge,” was published posthumously, entitled The Prelude and regarded as his major work. Wordsworth was England’s Poet Laureate from 1843-1850. Among many others, his poems include “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (often called “Daffodils”), “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Westminster Bridge,” and “The World Is Too Much with Us.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was also a philosopher and literary critic and collaborated with William Wordsworth in launching the Romantic movement. He wrote very influential literary criticism, including the major two-volume autobiographical, meditative discourse Biographia Literaria (1817). Coleridge acquainted English-language intellectuals with German idealist philosophy. He also coined many now familiar philosophical and literary terms, like “the willing suspension of disbelief,” meaning that readers would voluntarily withhold judgment of implausible stories if their authors could impart “human interest and a semblance of truth” to them. He strongly influenced the American Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Coleridge’s poem Love, a ballad (written to Sara Hutchinson), inspired John Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” He is credited with the origin of “Conversational Poetry” and Wordsworth’s adoption of it. Some of his best-known works include “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” “The Nightingale,” “Dejection: An Ode,” and “To William Wordsworth.”

George Gordon, Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, commonly known as Lord Byron (1788-1824) is known for long narrative poems “Don Juan,” “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and the shorter lyric poem “She Walks in Beauty.” The aristocratic Byron travelled throughout Europe, living in Italy for seven years. He fought in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, making him a national hero in Greece, before dying a year later from a fever contracted there. He was the most notoriously profligate and flamboyant Romantic poet, with reckless behaviors including multiple bisexual love affairs, adultery, rumored incest, self-exile, and enormous debts. He became friends with fellow Romantic writers Percy Bysshe Shelley, the future Mary Shelley, and John Polidori. Their shared fantasy writing at a Swiss villa the summer of 1816 resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Byron’s Fragment of a Novel, and was the inspiration for Polidori’s The Vampyre, establishing the romantic vampire genre. Byron also wrote linguistic volumes on American and Armenian grammars. His name is synonymous today with the mercurial Romantic.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was not famous during life but became so after death, particularly for his lyric poetry. His best-known works include “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “Music,” “When Soft Voices Die,” “The Cloud,” “The Masque of Anarchy”; longer poems “Queen Mab”/”The Daemon of the World” and “Adonaïs”; and the verse drama Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s second wife, Mary Shelley, was the daughter of his mentor William Godwin and the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman).Mary Shelley was also famous for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. Early in his career Shelley was influenced by William Wordsworth’s Romantic poetry, and wrote the long poem Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. Soon thereafter he met Lord Byron, and was inspired to write “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”. He composed “Mont Blanc,” inspired by touring the French Alpine commune Chamonix-Mont-Blanc. Shelley also encouraged Byron to compose his epic poem Don Juan. Shelley inspired Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and others to civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, vegetarianism, and animal rights.

John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821), despite his short life, was a major English Romantic poet. He is known for his six Odes: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “To Autumn.” Other notable works include the sonnet “O Solitude,” “Endymion,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Hyperion,” and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. The intensity and maturity he achieved in only six years are often praised since his death, though during life he felt he accomplished nothing lasting. He wrote a year before dying, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” He was proven wrong. His verse from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is renowned: “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Modernism in Yeats’ Poetry
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was among the greatest influences in 20th-century English literature and was believed transitional from Romanticism to Modernism. His earlier verses were lyrical, but later became realistic, symbolic, and apocalyptic. He was fascinated with Irish legend, occult subjects, and historical cycles—“gyres.” He incorporated Irish folklore, mythology, and legends in “The Stolen Child,” “The Wanderings of Oisin,” “The Death of Cuchulain,” “Who Goes with Fergus?” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Early collections included The Secret Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds. His later, most significant poetry collections include The Green Helmet, Responsibilities, The Tower, and The Winding Stair. Yeats’s visionary, apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming” (1920) reflects his belief that his times were the anarchic end of the Christian cycle/gyre: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

Poetic Themes and Devices
Carpe Diem Tradition in Poetry
Carpe diem is Latin for “seize the day.” A long poetic tradition, it advocates making the most of time because it passes swiftly and life is short. It is found in multiple languages, including Latin, Torquato Tasso’s Italian, Pierre de Ronsard’s French, and Edmund Spenser’s English, and is often used in seduction to argue for indulging in earthly pleasures. Roman poet Horace’s Ode 1.11 tells younger woman Leuconoe to enjoy the present, not worrying about inevitable aging. Two Renaissance Metaphysical Poets, Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick, treated carpe diem more as a call to action. In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell points out that time is fleeting, arguing for love, and concluding that because they cannot stop time, they may as well defy it, getting the most out of the short time they have. In “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” Herrick advises young women to take advantage of their good fortune in being young by getting married before they become too old to attract men and have babies.

“To His Coy Mistress” begins, “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” Using imagery, Andrew Marvell describes leisure they could enjoy if time were unlimited. Arguing for seduction, he continues famously, “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.” He depicts time as turning beauty to death and decay. Contradictory images in “amorous birds of prey” and “tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life” overshadow romance with impending death, linking present pleasure with mortality and spiritual values with moral considerations. Marvell’s concluding couplet summarizes carpe diem: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” begins with the famous “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Rather than seduction to live for the present, Robert Herrick’s experienced persona advises young women’s future planning: “Old time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying.”

Couplets and Meter to Enhance Meaning in Poetry
When a poet uses a couplet—a stanza of two lines, rhymed or unrhymed—it can function as the answer to a question asked earlier in the poem, or the solution to a problem or riddle. Couplets can also enhance the establishment of a poem’s mood, or clarify the development of a poem’s theme. Another device to enhance thematic development is irony, which also communicates the poet’s tone and draws the reader’s attention to a point the poet is making. The use of meter gives a poem a rhythmic context, contributes to the poem’s flow, makes it more appealing to the reader, can represent natural speech rhythms, and produces specific effects. For example, in “The Song of Hiawatha,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uses trochaic (/ ᴗ) tetrameter (four beats per line) to evoke for readers the rhythms of Native American chanting: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water / Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.” (Italicized syllables are stressed; non-italicized syllables are unstressed.)

Effects of Figurative Devices on Meaning in Poetry
Through exaggeration, hyperbole communicates the strength of a poet’s or persona’s feelings and enhances the mood of the poem. Imagery appeals to the reader’s senses, creating vivid mental pictures, evoking reader emotions and responses, and helping to develop themes. Irony also aids thematic development by drawing the reader’s attention to the poet’s point and communicating the poem’s tone. Thematic development is additionally supported by the comparisons of metaphors and similes, which emphasize similarities, enhance imagery, and affect readers’ perceptions. The use of mood communicates the atmosphere of a poem, builds a sense of tension, and evokes the reader’s emotions. Onomatopoeia appeals to the reader’s auditory sense and enhances sound imagery even when the poem is visual (read silently) rather than auditory (read aloud). Rhyme connects and unites verses, gives the rhyming words emphasis and makes poems more fluent. Symbolism communicates themes, develops imagery, and evokes readers’ emotional and other responses.

Poetic Structure to Enhance Meaning
The opening stanza of Romantic English poet, artist and printmaker William Blake’s famous poem “The Tyger” demonstrates how a poet can create tension by using line length and punctuation independently of one another: “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The first three lines of this stanza are trochaic (/ᴗ), with “masculine” endings—that is, strongly stressed syllables at the ends of each of the lines. But Blake’s punctuation contradicts this rhythmic regularity by not providing any divisions between the words “bright” and “In” or between “eye” and “Could.” This irregular punctuation foreshadows how Blake disrupts the meter at the end of this first stanza by using a contrasting dactyl (/ᴗᴗ), with a “feminine” (unstressed) ending syllable in the last word, “symmetry.” Thus Blake uses structural contrasts to heighten the intrigue of his work.

In enjambment, one sentence or clause in a poem does not end at the end of its line or verse, but runs over into the next line or verse. Clause endings coinciding with line endings give readers a feeling of completion, but enjambment influences readers to hurry to the next line to finish and understand the sentence. In his blank-verse epic religious poem “Paradise Lost,” John Milton wrote: “Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, / Built like a temple, where pilasters round / Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave.” Only the third line is end-stopped. Milton, describing the palace of Pandemonium bursting from Hell up through the ground, reinforced this idea through phrases and clauses bursting through the boundaries of the lines. A caesura is a pause in mid-verse. Milton’s commas in the third and fourth lines signal caesuras. They interrupt flow, making the narration jerky to imply that Satan’s glorious-seeming palace has a shaky and unsound foundation.

Reflection of Content Through Structure
Wallace Stevens’ short yet profound poem “The Snow Man” is reductionist: the snow man is a figure without human biases or emotions. Stevens begins, “One must have a mind of winter,” the criterion for realizing nature and life does not inherently possess subjective qualities; we only invest it with these. Things are not as we see them; they simply are. The entire poem is one long sentence of clauses connected by conjunctions and commas, and modified by relative clauses and phrases. The successive phrases lead readers continually to reconsider as they read. Stevens’ construction of the poem mirrors the meaning he conveys. With a mind of winter, the snow man, Stevens concludes, “nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is” (ultimate reductionism).

Contrast of Content and Structure
Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) is deceptively short and simple, with only four stanzas, each of only four lines, and short and simple words. Reinforcing this is Frost’s use of regular rhyme and meter. The rhythm is iambic tetrameter throughout; the rhyme scheme is AABA in the first three stanzas and AAAA in the fourth. In an additional internal subtlety, B ending “here” in the first stanza is rhymed with A endings “queer,” “near,” and “year” of the second; B ending “lake” in the second is rhymed in A endings “shake”, “mistake,” and “flake” of the third. The final stanza’s AAAA endings reinforce the ultimate darker theme. Though the first three stanzas seem to describe quietly watching snow fill the woods, the last stanza evokes the seductive pull of mysterious death: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” countered by the obligations of living life: “But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” The last line’s repetition strengthens Frost’s message that despite death’s temptation, life’s course must precede it.

Repetition to Enhance Meaning
A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem composed of five tercets and one quatrain. The defining characteristic is the repetition: two lines appear repeatedly throughout the poem. In Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” the two repeated lines are “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.” At first these sound paradoxical, but the meaning is gradually revealed through the poem. The repetition also fits with the theme of cycle: the paradoxes of waking to sleep, learning by going, and thinking by feeling represent a constant cycle through life. They also symbolize abandoning conscious rationalism to embrace spiritual vision. We wake from the vision to “Great Nature,” and “take the lively air.” “This shaking keeps me steady”—another paradox—juxtaposes and balances fear of mortality with ecstasy in embracing experience. The transcendent vision of all life’s interrelationship demonstrates, “What falls away is always. And is near.” Readers experience the poem holistically, like music, through Roethke’s integration of theme, motion, and sound.

Sylvia Plath’s villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song” narrows the scope from universal to personal but keeps the theme of cycle. The two repeated lines, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead” and “(I think I made you up inside my head.)” reflect the existential viewpoint that nothing exists in any absolute reality outside of our own perceptions. In the first stanza, the middle line, “I lift my lids and all is born again,” in its recreating the world, bridges between the repeated refrain statements—one of obliterating reality, the other of having constructed her lover’s existence. Unlike other villanelles wherein key lines are subtly altered in their repetitions, Plath repeats these exactly each time. This reflects the young woman’s love, constant throughout the poem as it neither fades nor progresses.

Informational Texts
Language Use
Literal and Figurative Language
As in fictional literature, informational text also uses both literal language, which means just what it says, and figurative language, which imparts more than literal meaning. For example, an informational text author might use a simile or direct comparison, such as writing that a racehorse “ran like the wind.” Informational text authors also use metaphors or implied comparisons, such as “the cloud of the Great Depression.”

Denotative and Connotative Meaning
Similar to literal and figurative, denotation is the literal meaning or dictionary definition of a word whereas connotation is the feelings or thoughts associated with a word not included in its literal definition. For example, “politician” and “statesman” have the same denotation, but in context, “politician” may have a negative connotation while “statesman” may have a positive connotation. Teachers can help students understand positive or negative connotations of words depending on their sentence contexts. For example, the word “challenge” has a positive connotation in this sentence: “Although I finished last, I still accomplished the challenge of running the race.” Teachers can give students a multiple-choice game wherein they choose whether “challenge” here means (A) easy, (B) hard, (C) fun, or (D) taking work to overcome. The word “difficult” has a negative connotation in this sentence: “I finished last in the race because it was difficult.” Students choose whether “difficult” here means (A) easy, (B) hard, (C) fun, or (D) lengthy. Positive and negative connotations for the same word can also be taught. Consider the following sentence: “When the teacher asked Johnny why he was in the restroom so long, he gave a smart answer.” In this context, “smart” means disrespectful and carries a negative connotation. But in the sentence, “Johnny was smart to return to class from the restroom right away,” the same word means wise and carries a positive connotation.

Explicit and Implicit Information
When informational text states something explicitly, the reader is told by the author exactly what is meant, which can include the author’s interpretation or perspective of events. For example, a professor writes, “I have seen students go into an absolute panic just because they weren’t able to finish administering the Peabody [Picture Vocabulary Test] in the time they were allotted.” This explicitly tells the reader that the students were afraid, and by using the words “just because,” the writer indicates their fear was exaggerated out of proportion relative to what happened. However, another professor writes, “I have had students come to me, their faces drained of all color, saying ‘We weren’t able to finish the Peabody.’” This is an example of implicit meaning: the second writer did not state explicitly that the students were panicked. Instead, he wrote a description of their faces being “drained of all color.” From this description, the reader can infer the students were so frightened that their faces paled.

Technical Language
Technical language, found in scientific texts, is more impersonal than literary and vernacular language. Passive voice tone makes tone impersonal. For example, instead of writing, “We found this a central component of protein metabolism,” scientists write, “This was found a central component of protein metabolism.” While science professors traditionally instructed students to avoid active voice because it leads to first-person (“I” and “we”) usage, science editors today find passive voice dull and weak. Many journal articles combine both. Tone in technical science writing should be detached, concise, and professional. While one writes in the vernacular, “This chemical has to be available for proteins to be digested,” professionals write technically, “The presence of this chemical is required for the enzyme to break the covalent bonds of proteins.”

Making Inferences About Informational Text
With informational text, reader comprehension depends not only on recalling important statements and details, but also on reader inferences based on examples and details. Readers add information from the text to what they already know to draw inferences about the text. These inferences help the readers to fill in the information that the text does not explicitly state, enabling them to understand the text better. When reading a nonfictional autobiography or biography, for example, the most appropriate inferences might concern the events in the book, the actions of the subject of the autobiography or biography, and the message the author means to convey. When reading a nonfictional expository (informational) text, the reader would best draw inferences about problems and their solutions, and causes and their effects. When reading a nonfictional persuasive text, the reader will want to infer ideas supporting the author’s message and intent.

Standards for Citing Textual Evidence
Reading standards for informational texts expect sixth-graders to cite textual evidence to support their inferences and analyses. Seventh-graders are expected additionally to identify several specific pieces of textual evidence to defend each of their conclusions. Eighth-graders are expected to differentiate strong from weak textual evidence. Ninth- and 10th-graders are expected to be able to cite thorough evidence as well as strong evidence from text. Eleventh- and 12th-graders are expected, in combination with the previous grade-level standards, to determine which things are left unclear in a text. Students must be able to connect text to their background knowledge and make inferences to understand text, judge it critically, draw conclusions about it, and make their own interpretations of it. Therefore, they must be able to organize and differentiate between main ideas and details in a text to make inferences about them. They must also be able to locate evidence in the text.

Paired Reading Strategy to Identify Main Ideas and Details
Students can support one another’s comprehension of informational text by working in pairs. Each student silently reads a portion of text. One summarizes the text’s main point, and then the other must agree or disagree and explain why until they reach an agreement. Then each person takes a turn at identifying details in the text portion that support the main idea that they have identified. Finally, they repeat each step with their roles reversed. Each pair of students can keep track of the central ideas and supporting details by taking notes in two columns: one for main ideas and the other for the details that support those main ideas.

Text Coding
Some experts (cf. Harvey and Daniels, 2009) recommend text coding or text monitoring as an active reading strategy to support student comprehension of informational texts. As they read, students make text code notations on Post-it Notes or in the margins of the text. Teachers should model text coding for students one or two codes at a time until they have demonstrated all eight codes: A check mark means “I know this.” An X means “This is not what I expected.” An asterisk (*) means “This is important.” A question mark means “I have a question about this.” Two question marks mean “I am really confused about this.” An exclamation point means “I am surprised at this.” An L means “I have learned something new from this.” And RR means “I need to reread this part.”

Structures or Organizational Patterns in Informational Texts
Informational text can be descriptive, invoking the five senses and answering the questions what, who, when, where, and why. Another structure of informational text is sequence and order. Chronological texts relate events in the sequence that they occurred, from start to finish, while how-to texts organize information into a series of instructions in the sequence in which the steps should be followed. Comparison-contrast structures of informational text describe various ideas to their readers by pointing out how things or ideas are similar and how they are different. Cause and effect structures of informational text describe events that occurred, and identify the causes or reasons that those events occurred. Problem and solution structures of informational text introduce and describe problems and offer one or more solutions for each problem described.

Media and Persuasion
Connections and Distinctions Among Elements in Text
Students should be able to analyze how an informational text makes connections and distinctions among ideas, events, or individuals, such as by comparing them or contrasting them, making analogies between them, or dividing them into categories to show similarities and differences. For example, teachers can help eighth-graders analyze how to divide animals into categories of carnivores, which eat only meat; herbivores, which eat only plants; and omnivores, which eat both meat and plants. Teachers and students can identify the author’s comparisons and contrasts of groups. Teachers can help students analyze these processes by supplying sentence frames. For example, “A ______ is a ______, so ______” and “A ______ is a ______ which means ______.” The students fill these empty spaces in, such as, “A frog is a carnivore, so it eats only meat,” and “A rabbit is an herbivore, which means it eats only plants.”

Text Features in Informational Texts
The title of a text gives readers some idea of its content. The table of contents is a list near the beginning of a text, showing the book’s sections and chapters and their coinciding page numbers. This gives readers an overview of the whole text, and helps them find specific chapters easily. An appendix, at the back of the book or document, adds important information not in the main text. Also at the back, an index lists the book’s important topics alphabetically with their page numbers to help students find them easily. Glossaries, usually found at the backs of books, list technical terms alphabetically with their definitions to aid vocabulary learning and comprehension. Boldface print is used to emphasize certain words, often identifying words included in the text’s glossary where readers can look up their definitions. Headings separate sections of text and show the topic of each. Subheadings divide subject headings into smaller, more specific categories to help readers organize information. Footnotes, at the bottom of the page, give readers more information, such as citations or links. Bullet points list items separately, making facts and ideas easier to see and understand. A sidebar is a box of information to one side of the main text giving additional information, often on a more focused or in-depth example of a topic.

Illustrations and photographs are pictures that visually emphasize important points in text.  The captions below the illustrations explain what those images show. Charts and tables are visual forms of information that make something easier and faster to understand. Diagrams are drawings that show relationships or explain a process. Graphs visually show relationships of multiple sets of information plotted along vertical and horizontal axes. Maps show geographical information visually to help students understand the relative locations of places covered in the text. Timelines are visual graphics that show historical events in chronological order to help readers see their sequence.

Technical Material for Non-Technical Readers
Writing about technical subjects for non-technical readers differs from writing for colleagues in that authors begin with a different goal: it may be more important to deliver a critical message than to impart the maximum technical content possible. Technical authors also must assume that non-technical audiences do not have the expertise to comprehend extremely scientific or technical messages, concepts, and terminology. They must resist the temptation to impress audiences with their scientific knowledge and expertise and remember that their primary purpose is to communicate a message that non-technical readers will understand, feel, and respond to. Non-technical and technical styles include similarities: both should formally cite references when used and acknowledge other authors’ work utilized. Both must follow intellectual property and copyright regulations. This includes the author’s protecting his/her own rights, or a public domain statement, as s/he chooses.

Non-Technical Audiences
Writers of technical or scientific material may need to write for many non-technical audiences. Some readers have no technical or scientific background, and those who do may not be in the same field as the authors. Government and corporate policymakers and budget managers need technical information they can understand for decision-making. Citizens affected by technology and/or science are another audience. Non-governmental organizations can encompass many of the preceding groups. Elementary and secondary school programs also need non-technical language for presenting technical subject matter. Additionally, technical authors will need to use non-technical language when collecting consumer responses to surveys, presenting scientific or para-scientific material to the public, writing about the history of science, and writing about science and technology in developing countries.

Use of Everyday Language
When authors of technical information must write about their subjects using non-technical language that readers outside their disciplinary fields can comprehend, they should not only use non-technical terms, they should also use normal, everyday language to accommodate non-native-language readers. For example, instead of writing that “eustatic changes” like “thermal expansion” are causing “hazardous conditions” in the “littoral zone,” an author would do better to write that a “rising sea level” is “threatening the coast.” When technical terms cannot be avoided, authors should also define and/or explain them using non-technical language. Although authors must cite references and acknowledge others’ work they use, they should avoid the kinds of references or citations that they would use in scientific journals—unless they reinforce author messages. They should not use endnotes, footnotes, or any other complicated referential techniques because non-technical journal publishers usually do not accept them. Including high-resolution illustrations, photos, maps, or satellite images and incorporating multimedia into digital publications will enhance public non-technical writing about technical subjects. Technical authors may publish using non-technical language in e-journals, trade journals, specialty newsletters, and daily newspapers.

Evaluating Arguments Made by Informational Text Writers
When evaluating an informational text, the first step is to identify the argument’s conclusion. Then identify the author’s premises that support the conclusion. Try to paraphrase premises for clarification and make the conclusion and premises fit. List all premises first, sequentially numbered, then finish with the conclusion. Identify any premises or assumptions not stated by the author but required for the stated premises to support the conclusion. Read word assumptions sympathetically, as the author might. Evaluate whether premises reasonably support the conclusion. For inductive reasoning, the reader should ask if the premises are true, if they support the conclusion, and how strongly. For deductive reasoning, the reader should ask if the argument is valid or invalid. If all premises are true, the argument is valid unless the conclusion can be false. If it can, then the argument is invalid. Alter an invalid argument to become valid, adding any premises needed.

Determining an Informational Author’s Purpose
Informational authors’ purposes are why they write texts. Readers must determine authors’ motivations and goals. Readers gain greater insight into a text by considering the author’s motivation. This develops critical reading skills. Readers perceive writing as a person’s voice, not simply printed words. Uncovering author motivations and purposes empowers readers to know what to expect from the text, read for relevant details, evaluate authors and their work critically, and respond effectively to the motivations and persuasions of the text. The main idea of a text is what the reader is supposed to understand from reading it; the purpose of the text is why the author has written it and what the author wants readers to do with its information. Authors state some purposes clearly, while others may be unstated but equally significant. When purposes stated contradict other parts of a text, the authors may have hidden agendas. Readers can better evaluate a text’s effectiveness, whether they agree or disagree with it, and why they agree or disagree through identifying unstated author purposes.

Identifying Author’s Point of View or Purpose
In some informational texts, readers find it easy to identify the author’s point of view and/or purpose, as when the author explicitly states his or her position and/or reason for writing. But other texts are more difficult, either because of the content or because the authors give neutral or balanced viewpoints. This is particularly true in scientific texts, in which authors may state the purpose of their research in the report, but never state their point of view except by interpreting evidence or data.

To analyze text and identify point of view or purpose, readers should ask themselves the following four questions:

1.       With what main point or idea does this author want to persuade readers to agree?

2.       How do this author’s choices of words affect the way that readers consider this subject?

3.       How do this author’s choices of examples and/or facts affect the way that readers consider this subject?

4.       What is it that this author wants to accomplish by writing this text?

Use of Rhetoric
There are many ways authors can support their claims, arguments, beliefs, ideas, and reasons for writing informational texts. For example, authors can appeal to readers’ sense of logic by communicating their reasoning through a carefully sequenced series of logical steps to help “prove” the points made. Authors can appeal to readers’ emotions by using descriptions and words that evoke feelings of sympathy, sadness, anger, righteous indignation, hope, happiness, or any other emotion to reinforce what they express and share with their audience. Authors may appeal to the moral or ethical values of readers by using words and descriptions that can convince readers that something is right or wrong. By relating personal anecdotes, authors can supply readers with more accessible, realistic examples of points they make, as well as appealing to their emotions. They can provide supporting evidence by reporting case studies. They can also illustrate their points by making analogies to which readers can better relate.

Rhetorical Devices
- An anecdote is a brief story authors may relate, which can illustrate their points in a more real and relatable way.
- Aphorisms concisely state common beliefs and may rhyme. For example, Benjamin Franklin’s “Early to bed and early to rise / Make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” is an aphorism.
- Allusions refer to literary or historical figures to impart symbolism to a thing or person, and/or create reader resonance. In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, protagonist George’s last name is Milton, alluding to John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost, to symbolize George’s eventual loss of his dream.
- Satire ridicules or pokes fun at human foibles or ideas, as in the works of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.
- A parody is a form of satire that imitates another work to ridicule its topic and/or style.
- A paradox is a statement that is true despite appearing contradictory.
- Hyperbole is overstatement using exaggerated language.
- An oxymoron combines seeming contradictions, such as “deafening silence.”
- Analogies compare two things that share common elements.
- Similes (stated comparisons using the words “like” or “as”) and metaphors (implied comparisons) are considered forms of analogy.
- When using logic to reason with audiences, syllogism refers either to deductive reasoning or a deceptive, very sophisticated, or subtle argument.
- Deductive reasoning moves from general to specific, inductive reasoning from specific to general.
- Diction is author word choice establishing tone and effect.
- Understatement achieves effects like contrast or irony by downplaying or describing something more subtly than warranted.
- Chiasmus uses parallel clauses, the second reversing the order of the first. Examples include T. S. Eliot’s “Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?” and John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
- Anaphora regularly repeats a word or phrase at the beginnings of consecutive clauses or phrases to add emphasis to an idea. A classic example of anaphora was Winston Churchill’s emphasis of determination: “We shall fight in the trenches. We shall fight on the oceans. We shall fight in the sky.”

Evaluating Media Information Sources
With the wealth of media in different formats available today, users are more likely to take media at face value. However, to understand the content of media, consumers must critically evaluate each source.

Users should ask themselves the following questions about media sources:
- Who is delivering this message, and why?
- What methods do a media source’s publishers employ to gain and maintain users’ attention?
- Which points of view is the media source representing?
- What are the various ways a message could be interpreted?
- What information is missing from the message?
- Is the source scholarly, i.e., peer-reviewed?
- Does it include author names and their credentials pertinent to the information?
- Who publishes it, and why?
- Who is the target audience?
- Is the language technically specific or non-technical/public?
- Are sources cited, research claims documented, conclusions based on furnished evidence, and references provided?
- Is the publication current?

Other Considerations for the Validity of Sources
For books, consider whether information is up-to-date and whether historical perspectives apply. Content is more likely to be scholarly if publishers are universities, government, or professional organizations. Book reviews can also provide useful information. For articles, identify the author, publisher, frequency of periodical publication, and what kind of advertising, if any, is included. Looking for book reviews also informs users. For articles, look for biographical author information; publisher name; frequency of periodical publication; and whether advertising is included and, if so, whether for certain occupations/disciplines. For web pages, check their domain names, identify publishers or sponsors, look for author/publisher contact information, check dates of most recent page updates, and be alert to biases and verify information’s validity. Quality and accuracy of web pages located through search engines rather than library databases ranges widely, requiring careful user inspection. Web page recommendations from reliable sources like university faculties can help indicate quality and accuracy. Citations of websites by credible or scholarly sources also show reliability. Authors’ names, relevant credentials, affiliations, and contact information support their authority. Site functionality, such as ease of navigation, ability to search, site maps and/or indexes, are also criteria to consider.

Persuasive Media
Some media that use persuasion are advertising, public relations, and advocacy. Advertisers use persuasion to sell goods and services. The public relations field uses persuasion to give good impressions of companies, governments, or organizations. Advocacy groups use persuasion to garner support or votes. Persuasion can come through commercials, public service announcements, speeches, websites, and newsletters, among others. Activists, lobbyists, government officials, and politicians use political rhetoric involving persuasive techniques. Basic techniques include using celebrity spokespersons, whom consumers admire or aspire to resemble; or, conversely, “everyday people” (albeit often portrayed by actors) with whom consumers identify. Using expert testimonials lends credibility. Explicit claims of content, effectiveness, quality, and reliability—which often cannot be proven or disproven—are used to persuade. While news and advocacy messages mostly eschew humor for credibility’s sake (except in political satire), advertising often persuades via humor, which gets consumer attention and associates its pleasure with advertised products and services. “Weasel words,” such as qualifiers, are often combined with exaggerated claims. Intensifiers—hyperbole, superlatives, and repetition—and sentimental appeals are also persuasive.

Intermediate Techniques
Dangerous propagandist Adolf Hitler said people suspect little lies more than big ones; hence the “Big Lie” is a persuasion method requiring consumers’ keen critical thinking to identify. A related method is charisma, which can induce people to believe messages they would otherwise reject. Euphemism substitutes abstract, vague, or bland terms for more graphic, clear, and unpleasant ones. For example, the terms “layoffs” and “firing” are replaced by “downsizing,” and “torture” is replaced with “intensive interrogation techniques.” Extrapolation bases sweeping conclusions on small amounts of minor information to appeal to what consumers wish or hope. Flattery appeals to consumer self-esteem needs, such as L’Oreal’s “You’re worth it.” Flattery is sometimes accomplished through contrast, like ads showing others’ mistakes to make consumers feel superior and smarter. “Glittering generalities” are “virtue” concepts, such as beauty, love, health, democracy, freedom, and science. Persuaders use these tactics to gain consumer acceptance without consumers questioning what they mean. The opposite is name-calling to persuade consumers to reject someone or something.

American citizens love new ideas and technology. Persuaders exploit this by emphasizing the newness of products, services, and candidates. Conversely, they also use nostalgia to evoke consumers’ happy memories, which they often remember more than unhappy ones. Citing “scientific evidence” is an intermediate version of the basic technique of expert testimonials. Consumers may accept this as proof, but some advertisers, politicians, and other persuaders may present inaccurate or misleading “evidence.” Another intermediate technique is the “simple solution.” Although the natures of people and life are complex, when consumers feel overwhelmed by complexity, persuaders exploit this by offering policies, products, or services they claim will solve complicated problems with simple means. Persuaders also use symbols—images, words, and names we associate with more general, emotional concepts like lifestyle, country, family, religion, and gender. While symbols have power, their significance also varies across individuals: for example, some consumers regard the Hummer SUV as a prestigious status symbol, while others regard it as environmentally harmful and irresponsible.

Advanced Techniques
Ad hominem, Latin for “against the man”—also called “shoot the messenger”—attacks someone delivering a message, not the message itself. It operates by association; problems with the messenger must indicate problems with the message. “Stacking the deck” misleads by presenting only selected information that supports one position. Denial evades responsibility, either directly or indirectly, for controversial or unpopular subjects. A politician saying, “I won’t mention my opponent’s tax evasion issues” manages to mention them while seeming less accusatory. Persuaders use majority belief, such as “Four out of five dentists recommend this brand” or the ubiquitous “[insert number] people can’t be wrong.” In an intensified version, persuaders exploit group dynamics at rallies, speeches, and other live-audience events where people are vulnerable to surrounding crowd influences. Scapegoating—blaming one person or group for complex problems, is a form of the intermediate “simple solution” technique, a practice common in politics. Timing also persuades, like advertising flowers and candy preceding Valentine’s Day, ad campaigns preceding new technology rollouts, and politician speeches following big news events.