AP English Language & Composition

Lesson 1.1 · Unit 1 · CED skill 1.A

The rhetorical situation: who is speaking, to whom, and why

Every text is somebody's answer to something. Before you can explain how a piece of writing works, you have to know what it was answering: the problem, the writer, the people addressed, what the writer wanted from them. Skip that and you write “the author uses a serious tone”: a guess about a feeling, not a claim about a choice.

Lesson 1.2 · Unit 1 · CED skill 1.A

Exigence: the problem that makes a text necessary

Exigence is not the topic. The topic of Paine's pamphlet is the war; the exigence is that in December 1776 Washington's army was dissolving and most enlistments expired on the last day of the month. Topic is what a text is about. Exigence is what goes wrong if nobody writes it.

Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · CED skill 1.A

Purpose and message: what the writer wants this audience to do

Weak analysis collapses three things into one. The subject is what a text is about. The message is the claim it delivers about that subject. The purpose is the effect the writer wants on a particular audience, and purpose is the only one of the three that changes when the audience changes.

Lesson 1.4 · Unit 1 · CED skill 3.A

Claims: arguable statements, not facts or preferences

A claim is a statement a reasonable person could dispute, which is why it needs proof. “The Civil War ended in 1865” is a fact; nobody argues with it. “Reconstruction was betrayed” is a claim, and it owes you evidence. Most weak theses fail here: they are facts or preferences wearing the grammar of an argument.

Lesson 1.5 · Unit 1 · CED skill 3.A

Evidence: the kinds, and the three tests that matter

Evidence is not proof. A quotation, a number, or a story becomes evidence only when it bears on the claim actually made, when there is enough of it, and when it is typical of what it stands in for. No reader is impressed that you cited something; they want to know why it settles anything.

Lesson 1.6 · Unit 1 · CED skill 4.A

Writing a paragraph that makes a claim and proves it

Now you write one. A body paragraph does three things in order: it makes a claim, it puts attributed evidence under that claim, and it explains the connection. Most student paragraphs manage the first two and stop, or stop one word later, at “this shows that,” which announces commentary without supplying any.

Unit 1 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 1 review: the rhetorical situation, claims, and evidence

Six reading questions on one passage and four revision questions on a student draft, covering exigence and purpose (1.1–1.3), what makes a claim arguable (1.4), the tests evidence has to pass (1.5), and the shape of a claim-and-evidence paragraph (1.6): click an option to see why it is right or wrong.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863.

   But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

   The passage was delivered at the dedication of a soldiers' cemetery four months after the battle fought on that ground, with the war still going on. The rhetorical situation is best described as

   a funeral oration whose task is to praise the dead individually and console the families present a dedication ceremony whose stated purpose the speaker redirects toward a war that is still being fought a legal argument defending the administration's conduct of the war before its critics an announcement of the government's policy toward the seceded states once the fighting ends

   A eulogy names people and offers comfort; this one names no soldier, no unit, and no family, and it ends by handing the audience a job rather than consolation. Reading the occasion off the event rather than off the text is the commonest error on situation questions.

   Correct. The occasion is a burial, but the passage refuses the ceremony's own business, the speaker cannot dedicate anything, and turns the audience toward “the unfinished work,” which is the war itself. Naming the gap between the stated occasion and the writer's purpose is what a rhetorical-situation question rewards.

   Nothing in the passage answers an objection or defends a power; there is no opponent in it at all. A text can be politically useful without being an argument addressed to critics, and treating every wartime speech as a defense misses what this one asks for.

   The passage never mentions the seceded states, the terms of peace, or any policy; “the unfinished work” names the effort still under way, not a plan for afterward. Purpose is what the writer wants from this audience now, not what the historical moment makes you think of.

2. In the passage above, the writer's primary purpose in the second sentence (“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it…”) is to

   move the power of consecration from the ceremony to what the soldiers did, so that acts outrank words insist that the ground was already sacred before the battle, which makes the dedication unnecessary separate the surviving soldiers from the dead so that the survivors are honored first praise by name the officers who commanded at Gettysburg and the units they led

   Correct. The sentence takes the verb the ceremony was built around and gives it to someone else: the men “have consecrated it,” already, “far above our poor power.” That transfer is what licenses the demand in the last sentence, since a debt to an act is harder to discharge with a speech.

   The sentence says the ground was consecrated by the struggle, not that it was sacred beforehand: the whole point is that something the soldiers did changed it. A purpose statement has to survive a second reading of the sentence it describes.

   “Living and dead” joins the two groups inside one phrase rather than ranking them, and no survivor is singled out anywhere in the passage. Watch for choices that invent a distinction the writer deliberately collapsed.

   No officer, regiment, or state appears in the passage, and the anonymity is a choice: unnamed “brave men” can stand for the whole army, which is what a demand on the living requires. Naming would have narrowed the debt.

3. In the passage above, the claim the writer most clearly advances is that

   ceremonies of this kind accomplish nothing and should be given up this address deserves to be remembered longer than the battle it commemorates the men buried here have not yet received a monument equal to their sacrifice the meaning of the ground was settled by what was done on it, so the audience's task is not commemoration but continuation

   The speaker doubts what words can do here, but he is performing the ceremony rather than abolishing it, and he uses it to ask for something. A claim has to be the disputable sentence the text defends, not the strongest-sounding line in it.

   This reverses the passage: “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here” predicts the opposite about the speech and contrasts it with what the soldiers did. Options that flip a comparison are the easiest distractors to catch if you reread the sentence.

   Nothing here asks for a monument, and the argument runs the other way: the ground is already consecrated “far above our poor power to add.” A true-sounding statement about Gettysburg is not automatically a claim the passage makes.

   Correct. Every move in the passage feeds this: the ceremony cannot add anything, the soldiers already did the consecrating, and what remains for the living is “the unfinished work.” That sentence is arguable, a listener could answer that remembrance is itself the obligation, which is what makes it the claim.

4. In the passage above, the line of reasoning moves from

   a general principle about war, to an example drawn from this battle, to a prediction about the next one a description of the ground, through a narrative of the battle, to a tribute to the men who died what the living cannot do, to the reason they cannot, to the obligation that is left a concession to the speaker's critics, to a rebuttal of them, to a restatement of the concession

   The passage states no general rule about war and makes no prediction about future fighting; its only forecast is that the speech will be forgotten. A line of reasoning has to be described from the order of the actual claims, not from a familiar template.

   There is no description of the field and no narrative of the fighting: the battle is referred to only as what “they did here.” Summarizing a text you expected instead of the one printed is how reasoning questions are usually missed.

   Correct. Sentence one denies that the living can consecrate; sentence two supplies the reason, that the soldiers already did it; sentences three and four draw the consequence, that the work rather than the words is what falls to the audience. Each step earns the next, which is the test of a line of reasoning.

   No critic is addressed and no position is granted and then answered. The first sentence looks like a concession because it gives something up, but it gives up the speaker's own power, which sets up a demand rather than a rebuttal.

5. In the passage above, the effect of the repeated construction “we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow” is to

   raise the claim with each verb, so that the refusal arrives as a finding rather than as modesty list three separate ceremonies the audience has already performed on the site signal the speaker's private doubt about whether the war can be won produce a solemn, churchlike rhythm appropriate to the occasion, and nothing more

   Correct. The verbs escalate from the civic act of dedicating to the religious acts of consecrating and hallowing, so each denial is larger than the one before it. A speaker who simply meant to be humble would not need three tries, and the climb makes the refusal sound like something discovered on the spot.

   The three verbs name one act in rising terms, not three completed ceremonies, and all three appear in the negative, as things the living cannot do. Reading a triad as a list of items is the standard trap on repetition questions.

   The passage expresses no doubt about the war's outcome; the sentence concerns the speaker's power over this ground, and it ends by asking for more effort, not less. Transferring an emotion from the occasion onto the writer is guesswork, not analysis.

   Naming a device correctly and stopping at its sound is the error the exam tests for here. The rhythm is real, but the words also make a claim, that the ceremony cannot do what it was called to do, and that claim is what the rest of the passage builds on.

6. In the passage above, the writer's assumptions about the audience are best described as

   listeners hostile to the war, who must be argued out of their opposition before anything can be asked of them listeners who came to honor the dead and can be moved from honoring to obligation without giving up a belief listeners unfamiliar with the battle, who need its events narrated before they can be moved foreign governments whose recognition of the Union was still in doubt

   A hostile audience would have to be answered, and the passage answers nobody; it assumes agreement about the soldiers and spends its effort on what follows from that agreement. Assume opposition only where the text argues against something.

   Correct. The passage takes reverence for the dead as settled, it is the one premise never defended, and builds the request on top of it, so nobody is asked to change a belief, only to see what an existing one now requires. That is what “understanding an audience's values” looks like in practice.

   The battle is never narrated because the audience is standing on the field where it happened; the passage can say “what they did here” and be understood. An audience question asks what the text assumes its readers already hold, and this one assumes a great deal.

   The address was printed widely and did reach foreign readers, but nothing in it addresses a government or asks for recognition; the obligation it names falls on “us the living,” standing at the graves. A secondary audience is not the same as the one the text is built for.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Thomas Paine's wartime pamphlets.

   (1) In December 1776 the Continental Army had retreated across New Jersey. (2) Most of its soldiers' enlistments were due to expire on the last day of the month. (3) Paine turns the army's worst month into an argument for staying. (4) Washington had the pamphlet read aloud to the troops days before the attack on Trenton. (5) Paine spent much of his later life in France and England.

   The writer wants to add a quotation after sentence 3 that supports the claim made in that sentence. Which of the following, if added after sentence 3, best accomplishes this goal?

   Paine writes that “these are the times that try men's souls.” Paine writes that “what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” Paine writes that tyranny “is not easily conquered.” Paine had arrived in Philadelphia only two years earlier, in November 1774.

   The line is genuinely from the pamphlet, and it establishes that the moment is hard, which is the half of sentence 3 that nobody disputes. Evidence has to bear on the arguable half of a claim, and here that half is why hardship becomes a reason to stay.

   Correct. This sentence supplies the exchange rate the claim depends on: if cheap things are valued lightly, then a costly winter raises the worth of the cause rather than lowering it. That is the mechanism by which the worst month becomes an argument, so the quotation proves the disputable part.

   Conceding that tyranny is hard to beat again supports the difficulty, not the turn. It is the setup for Paine's move rather than the move itself, and a reader could accept it and still reject sentence 3.

   The date is accurate and tells you something about Paine, but a fact about the writer's biography cannot show what his argument does. Relevance is the first test evidence has to pass, and this one fails it before sufficiency is even in question.

8. In the draft above, the writer wants to make clear the relationship between sentence 3 and sentence 4. Which of the following is the best way to begin sentence 4?

   However, For instance, Because the argument was aimed at exactly those men, In conclusion,

   “However” promises a reversal, and sentence 4 does not reverse sentence 3: it shows the argument being put to work. A transition that names the wrong relationship costs more than no transition, because the reader follows it.

   Sentence 4 is not an instance of the argument Paine makes; it reports what a commander did with the pamphlet. “For instance” would send a reader looking for an example of the reasoning and hand him a fact about distribution instead.

   Correct. Sentence 4 is the consequence of sentence 3: because the pamphlet was built for men who could legally go home in days, it was worth reading aloud to exactly those men. The transition names a causal relationship, which is what a transition is for.

   Nothing is being concluded: two more sentences follow, and sentence 4 adds new information rather than summing anything up. Sequence words describe position in a paragraph; they do not describe how ideas are related.

9. In the draft above, the writer wants to combine sentences 1 and 2 to emphasize that Paine was writing for men who were legally free to leave. Which version best accomplishes this goal?

   In December 1776 the Continental Army had retreated across New Jersey, and most of its soldiers' enlistments were due to expire on the last day of the month. Having retreated across New Jersey in December 1776, the soldiers' enlistments were due to expire on the last day of the month. In December 1776, when most enlistments were due to expire on the last day of the month, the Continental Army had retreated across New Jersey. By December 1776 the Continental Army had retreated across New Jersey, and most of the men in it were free to go home at the end of the month.

   Joining the two facts with “and” makes them equal and leaves the sentence ending on a date. Combining sentences is only worth doing when the new arrangement puts the idea you care about where a reader's attention actually lands.

   The opening phrase now modifies “enlistments,” so the enlistments retreated across New Jersey. A dangling modifier is a clarity error, and it also buries the men themselves, who are the point of the sentence.

   This subordinates the enlistments and ends on the retreat, which reverses the emphasis the goal asks for. Subordination is a ranking device: whatever you put in the dependent clause is what you are telling the reader matters less.

   Correct. The retreat becomes the setting and the main clause ends on men who “were free to go home,” which is the fact the paragraph needs in the reader's mind before Paine's argument arrives. End-of-sentence position is the strongest emphasis English offers.

10. The writer is considering deleting sentence 5 from the draft above. Should the writer make this change?

    Yes, because the sentence moves to the later course of Paine's life and does nothing for a paragraph about one pamphlet and the men who first heard it. Yes, because a paragraph should never end with a sentence about a writer's biography. No, because Paine's later reputation abroad supports the claim that the pamphlet persuaded the soldiers who heard it. No, because the paragraph needs a concluding sentence and sentence 5 supplies one.

    Correct. Every other sentence is fixed to one month and one audience, and this one jumps decades and continents without bearing on the claim in sentence 3. The test for deletion is whether removing a sentence costs the argument anything; here it costs nothing.

    The reason is a made-up rule, not a judgment about this paragraph. Biography can be exactly the right evidence when the claim is about a writer's standing, Paine's reputation in 1776 would have been usable, so the flaw is relevance, not category.

    Fame in the 1790s cannot show what a pamphlet did in December 1776, and reasoning backward from a later reputation to an earlier effect is a real error rather than a careless one. Evidence has to be available to the moment the claim is about.

    A sentence is not a conclusion because it comes last. This one introduces new and unrelated information, which is the opposite of what a closing sentence does: a paragraph should end on the writer's own reasoning.

Lesson 2.1 · Unit 2 · CED skill 1.B

Audience: what readers believe, and what they must give up

Under indictment for voting, Susan B. Anthony spent the weeks before her 1873 trial giving the same speech in every postal district of the county her jury would come from. The prosecutor had the trial moved one county over; she went there and gave it again. An argument is never aimed at everyone: it is aimed at people who believe particular things and can do a particular thing.

Lesson 2.2 · Unit 2 · CED skill 1.B

Ethos, pathos, and logos: appeals are choices, not labels

Students learn the three appeals as a collection: spot one, name it, move on. That is not analysis, because an appeal is only ever an appeal to somebody. A sentence that builds credibility with a legislature sounds like showing off at a rally. Ask what this audience counts as proof and what it already cares about; the appeal is whatever answers those questions.

Lesson 2.3 · Unit 2 · CED skill 2.B

Writing for a specified audience: same claim, different argument

Now you do it on purpose. When a prompt hands you an audience, the claim stays put and everything under it changes: which premise you start from, which example you reach for, how formal you sound. “Women should vote” argued to a legislature is a question of statute. Argued to a household magazine in 1910, it had to be a question of housekeeping.

Lesson 2.4 · Unit 2 · CED skill 3.B

Finding the overarching thesis in long-form nonfiction

Essays do not put their thesis where a five-paragraph theme does. In long-form nonfiction the governing claim usually waits until the writer has been fair to the other side: it sits at the pivot, after the praise and before the objection, or in the last paragraph as a conclusion the reader has been walked toward. Sometimes it is never written down at all.

Lesson 2.5 · Unit 2 · CED skill 4.B

Writing a defensible thesis: three failures and their repairs

Row A is worth one point and is decided in about ten seconds. Readers withhold it for the same three reasons every year: the sentence gives the prompt back, or it announces a topic, or it states something nobody disputes. All three are repairable, and the repair is the same move: say the thing someone could argue with.

Lesson 2.6 · Unit 2 · CED skills 4.B and 3.B

Theses that preview: when a map helps and when it becomes a list

Some theses tell you the shape of what follows. That is useful when the parts depend on one another and useless when they are just three things the writer noticed. The difference is not length or elegance: it is whether removing an item breaks the argument.

Unit 2 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 2 review: audience and thesis

Six reading questions on one passage and four revision questions on a student draft, covering the beliefs and values an argument is built on (2.1–2.3), where an overarching thesis hides and what it previews (2.4, 2.6), and the three ways a thesis fails to be defensible (2.5): click an option to see why it is right or wrong.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Susan B. Anthony, “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?”, Monroe and Ontario Counties, New York, 1873.

   It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people — women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government — the ballot.

   Anthony delivered this speech, under indictment for having voted, in the counties from which her jury would be drawn. The rhetorical situation is best described as

   a convention address to fellow organizers, planning the next stage of a campaign a written brief submitted to the judge who would decide the case a public speech to the community that would supply her jurors, meant to make acquittal look like obedience to the Constitution a lecture urging women across the country to cast illegal ballots at the next election

   A speech to allies can assume the conclusion and argue about tactics; this one argues the conclusion itself, from a document, in the vocabulary of a courtroom. The exigence was a pending trial, not a campaign meeting.

   The passage is spoken to a room, “it is a downright mockery to talk to women”, and it appeals to a general sense of the preamble rather than to case law. A brief argues to one official; this argues to the people the official would seat as jurors.

   Correct. The exigence is the indictment, the audience is the pool her jury would come from, and the purpose follows: if the Constitution already made her a voter, a juror can acquit without approving of woman suffrage at all. Naming that gap between what the speaker wants and what she asks for is the situation question's real work.

   Nothing here recommends that anyone break a law; the argument is that no law was broken, which is the opposite move. A choice that reverses a speaker's legal posture is worth catching, because the whole strategy depends on it.

2. In the passage above, the claim the writer most clearly advances is that

   the Constitution was made by the whole people and therefore already entitles women to the ballot, so withholding it violates the document the framers meant the franchise to widen gradually, as public opinion came to allow it women have shown by their conduct that they have earned the same rights as men the states rather than the federal government should decide who is qualified to vote

   Correct. Every sentence serves this: the Union was formed by “the whole people,” it was formed “to secure” liberty rather than to hand it out, and the ballot is “the only means of securing” it. The claim is disputable, an opponent could answer that the preamble grants nothing to anyone, which is what makes it a thesis rather than a summary.

   Gradualism is exactly what the argument refuses; the right is presented as already held, not as something ripening. Watch for choices that make a speaker more moderate than the text does.

   An argument from merit would have to describe women's conduct, and this passage describes none. It rests on who made the Constitution, not on who has since deserved something, and the difference is the whole of her legal strategy.

   This reverses the passage, which sets the national Constitution above any state's rules. A true statement about nineteenth-century election law is not a claim the text makes.

3. Which choice best describes the function of the series in the passage above: “not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people”?

   It concedes that the authors of the preamble had a narrower group in mind than the speaker does. It strikes out, one at a time, the readings an opponent would have to insert into the preamble, leaving the broad reading as what the words actually say. It lists in order of size the three groups that held the franchise in 1873. It shifts the subject from the Constitution to the character of the men in the room.

   The series concedes nothing; it denies twice and then affirms. Reading a negative series as a concession is a common slip, and it would hand the argument to the other side before it began.

   Correct. The preamble does not say “white male citizens” or “male citizens,” so naming those phrases and rejecting them shows that an opponent must add words to the text while she need only read it. The order matters too: each rejected version is less restrictive than the last, so the burden of proof moves further onto her opponent with every clause.

   The three phrases are competing descriptions of one group, the people who “formed the Union”, not a census of voters. Reading a rhetorical series as a set of real categories is the trap here.

   No listener's character is mentioned anywhere in the series; the subject stays fixed on who wrote the preamble's “we.” A choice that moves the target of a passage is worth testing against the actual words.

4. In the passage above, the line of reasoning moves from

   an appeal to the audience's sympathy, to an account of her arrest, to a request for acquittal a definition of citizenship, to a survey of the states' voting laws, to a proposal for an amendment a concession that she broke the law, to an argument that the law is unjust, to a call to change it who made the government, to what they made it for, to the conclusion that withholding the ballot empties the promise

   There is no sympathy in the passage and no narrative of the arrest; the speaker argues from a document rather than from her own treatment. Describing a line of reasoning means following the claims that are there, not the ones the occasion suggests.

   No state law is surveyed and no amendment is proposed: proposing one would concede that the right does not yet exist, which is precisely what she refuses to concede. A distractor that contradicts the speaker's strategy is usually the one to eliminate first.

   She never grants that a law was broken. The argument is that the Constitution authorized the vote, so an unjust-law argument would give away the ground the whole speech is standing on.

   Correct. Each step earns the next: because the whole people formed the Union, the purpose was to secure liberty for all of them; because the ballot is the only means of securing it, denying the ballot to half the people defeats the purpose she has just established. That is a chain, not a list.

5. In the passage above, the effect of distinguishing a government formed “not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them” is to

   concede that the Constitution granted women nothing and must therefore be amended recast the ballot as the instrument of a right already possessed rather than a favor still to be granted argue that security matters more than liberty in a republic at peace praise the framers for their generosity toward the generations that followed them

   The distinction does the opposite work: a government that secures a right presupposes that the right is already there. Conceding that nothing was granted would collapse the argument she spends the passage building.

   Correct. “Give” makes the vote a gift a legislature may withhold; “secure” makes it the mechanism protecting something the holder already owns. Once the ballot is the means rather than the prize, denying it is a failure of duty rather than a refusal of a request, which is why the word choice is the argument and not decoration.

   “Secure” here means to make safe, not to provide security in the sense of order, and no comparison between the two values appears. Reading a word in its most familiar modern sense is how precise diction questions are missed.

   Generosity is the idea the sentence rules out: a gift is exactly what she denies the framers were making. A choice can name a real feature of the sentence and still assign it the wrong effect.

6. In the passage above, the writer's assumptions about her audience are best described as

   that they revere the founding document and would rather apply a rule they already accept than change their minds about women that they already favor woman suffrage and need only to be told how to act on it that they know little about the preamble and must have its history explained before anything can be argued that they are trained lawyers who can follow a technical argument about federal jurisdiction

   Correct. The preamble is never defended, only read, it is the premise the audience is assumed to hold, and the conclusion is offered as what that premise requires. That is the audience-fitted move: leave the belief intact and widen what it covers.

   Supporters would not need the preamble parsed phrase by phrase. The care taken to strike out “white male citizens” shows she expects readers who assume the narrower meaning.

   She quotes the preamble as something her listeners know by heart and can check against her paraphrase; no history of its drafting appears. An audience question asks what the text assumes is already shared.

   The argument is deliberately non-technical (no statute, no case, no jurisdictional analysis), because ordinary citizens, not lawyers, would sit in the jury box. Naming a plausible secondary audience is not the same as naming the one the text is built for.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about arguments written for a particular audience.

   (1) Jane Addams published “Why Women Should Vote” in the Ladies' Home Journal in January 1910. (2) Most of her readers were middle-class women who believed that a woman's first duty was to her household. (3) The essay is effective. (4) Addams never disputes that duty. (5) She argues that the work of the household has moved downtown, so a woman who wants a clean house and a healthy child now needs a ballot.

   The writer wants to replace sentence 3 with a sentence that states a defensible claim about the essay. Which version of sentence 3 best accomplishes this goal?

   The essay is well written and genuinely moving. The essay appeared in a magazine with one of the largest circulations in the country. Addams wins these readers by conceding the very premise her opponents thought decisive. This paragraph will examine the appeals Addams uses and the audience she uses them on.

   This trades one preference for another: “effective” becomes “moving,” and there is still nothing a reader could dispute or that the paragraph could prove. Readers withhold Row A for exactly this sentence every year.

   The circulation is a verifiable fact, and facts make good evidence and bad theses: nobody will argue with it, so nothing follows from it. Ask what someone could say back; silence means you have written a fact.

   Correct. It is arguable (a reader could answer that conceding the domestic premise limited how far the argument could go), it is specific to this essay, and sentences 4 and 5 already supply the proof. A thesis that could be contradicted is the one worth an essay.

   Announcing a topic promises that something will be discussed and commits to no claim about it. The repair is always to state the finding the paragraph would have reached anyway.

8. In the draft above, the writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 5 that provides specific evidence for the claim that the work of the household has moved downtown. Which of the following, if added after sentence 5, best accomplishes this goal?

   By 1910 Addams was one of the best-known women in the United States. A city's water supply, its milk inspection, and its collection of garbage were all settled by municipal departments rather than in any kitchen. Many women of the period disagreed with Addams and worked against suffrage. Keeping a house clean has always been demanding and undervalued work.

   Her fame is true and it helps explain why the magazine printed her, but it says nothing about where household work is now done. Evidence has to bear on the claim actually made, and this bears on a different one.

   Correct. It names the particular tasks and the particular bodies that had taken them over, which is exactly what “the work has moved downtown” asserts. Specific, checkable, and aimed at the disputable part of the claim: the three things Row B looks for.

   Opposition to suffrage is real and relevant to the essay's difficulty, but it is evidence about Addams's audience rather than about municipal housekeeping. A true statement that answers a nearby question is the most tempting kind of wrong evidence.

   A general observation about housework, offered without a date or a source, supports nothing in particular and would be granted by both sides. Evidence that no one would dispute cannot settle a dispute.

9. In the draft above, the writer wants sentence 5 to show that Addams substitutes a different argument for the dispute she declines in sentence 4. Which of the following is the best way to begin sentence 5?

   Instead, Similarly, As a result, For example,

   Correct. Sentence 4 says what Addams does not do and sentence 5 says what she does in its place, which is the substitution relationship “instead” exists to name. A transition earns its place only when it names the relationship the sentences actually have.

   “Similarly” claims the two sentences do the same kind of work, and they do opposite kinds: one withholds a move, the other supplies a different one. A wrong signpost is worse than none, because a reader follows it into the wrong reading.

   Sentence 5 is not caused by sentence 4; declining to dispute the premise does not produce the argument about municipal housekeeping. Causal transitions are the easiest to drop in and the easiest to get wrong.

   Sentence 5 is not an example of not disputing something; it is the alternative argument itself. “For example” promises an instance of the previous idea, and a reader who goes looking for one will not find it.

10. In the draft above, the writer wants to combine sentences 1 and 2 to emphasize the audience Addams was writing for. Which version best accomplishes this goal?

    Jane Addams published “Why Women Should Vote” in the Ladies' Home Journal in January 1910, and most of her readers were middle-class women who believed that a woman's first duty was to her household. Published in the Ladies' Home Journal in January 1910, most of Addams's readers were middle-class women who believed that a woman's first duty was to her household. Jane Addams, whose readers were middle-class women who believed that a woman's first duty was to her household, published “Why Women Should Vote” in the Ladies' Home Journal in January 1910. When Addams published “Why Women Should Vote” in January 1910, she was writing for Ladies' Home Journal subscribers who believed that a woman's first duty was to her household.

    Joining the originals with “and” keeps both facts at equal weight and changes nothing about emphasis. Combining is only worth doing when the new shape puts the important idea where a reader's attention lands.

    The opening phrase now attaches to “readers,” so the readers were published in the magazine. Beyond the dangling modifier, the version still leaves the audience as an afterthought rather than the point.

    Burying the audience in a relative clause and ending on the magazine and the date does the reverse of what the goal asks. Whatever sits in the subordinate slot is what you are telling a reader to treat as background.

    Correct. The date becomes the setting, and the main clause ends on readers “who believed that a woman's first duty was to her household”: the belief the rest of the paragraph is about. End position carries the emphasis, so the combination puts the audience there.

Lesson 3.1 · Unit 3 · CED skill 5.A

The line of reasoning: how claims carry a thesis to a conclusion

A thesis is a destination; the line of reasoning is the road: the ordered claims that move a reader from what they already believe to what they do not. When an argument feels unconvincing and you cannot say why, the trouble is usually here: a step is missing, or one claim does no work. The exam asks you to describe that order, then judge it. One job is a map, the other a verdict.

Lesson 3.2 · Unit 3 · CED skill 3.A

Evaluating evidence: relevance, sufficiency, representativeness, interest

Citing something is not proving something. Evidence earns its place only when it bears on the claim actually made, when there is enough of it to carry a claim that size, when the case is typical of what it stands in for, and when you know what the source stood to gain. Skip the last one and you will be impressed by a number that was chosen to impress you.

Lesson 3.3 · Unit 3 · CED skills 3.A and 4.A

Quantitative evidence: what a table claims and what it cannot

A table looks like a fact and behaves like a claim. Somebody decided what to count, what counted, which year to stop, and which column comes first. Every one of those decisions is a rhetorical choice you can name, and naming it is the difference between “the data shows” and analysis.

Lesson 3.4 · Unit 3 · CED skills 4.A and 6.A

Integrating a source: the shortest quotable unit and the sandwich

A dropped quotation is a piece of someone else's writing sitting in your paragraph with no job. The repair is not a longer quotation; it is a shorter one, with a sentence of yours on both sides. Attribute it, keep only the words you intend to analyze, then say what those words are doing there.

Lesson 3.5 · Unit 3 · CED skills 4.A and 6.A

Building a body paragraph: claim, evidence, commentary

Row B of every AP Lang rubric comes down to proportion. Readers award a 4 when the commentary explains how the evidence supports the claim, not that it does, which means the last third of a paragraph is where the score lives, and most students spend it on another quotation. A paragraph with the right shape reads like a hand-off: your claim, the writer's words, your reasoning, and then you are the one still talking.

Lesson 3.6 · Unit 3 · CED skills 4.A and 6.A

Putting sources in conversation: agreement, extension, tension, qualification

A synthesis essay that walks through its sources one at a time is a tour, not an argument. The repair is a single sentence type: one that makes two sources touch. Once you can write that sentence, the sources stop being a list and start being evidence for a claim of your own.

Unit 3 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 3 review: evidence, sources, and the line of reasoning

Six reading questions on one passage and four revision questions on a student draft, covering the chain of claims that carries a thesis (3.1), the tests evidence must pass (3.2), what a table can and cannot claim (3.3), attributing and fitting a source (3.4), the claim–evidence–commentary paragraph (3.5), and qualification as a relationship between positions (3.6): click an option to see why it is right or wrong.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” 1849: the opening paragraph.

   I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

   Thoreau first delivered this material as a lecture in Concord and published it in 1849, after a night in jail for refusing a tax to a government that was waging war on Mexico and protecting slavery. The rhetorical situation is best described as

   a petition to a legislature asking for the repeal of one particular tax a courtroom defense addressed to the judge who had ordered him jailed a newspaper editorial answering a decision announced the previous week an argument to private readers who hold no office, about what a citizen owes a government he judges to be wrong

   A petition asks a body with power to do one thing, and this passage asks nobody for anything; it examines the idea of government itself. The exigence was a private refusal, not a bill before a legislature.

   Nothing here is addressed to a court or concerned with a verdict, and the argument would have been useless as a legal defense: “most governments are usually inexpedient” is not a plea. Occasion and audience have to be read off the text.

   The passage names no event, date, or decision to respond to. An essay can be provoked by events and still be built for readers who will meet it years later, which is what the general, timeless phrasing signals here.

   Correct. The audience is readers with no vote on the matter and no office to use, which is exactly why the argument runs on conscience rather than on policy: the only thing such readers control is their own compliance. Naming who can act on a text is the fastest route into its purpose.

2. In the passage above, the claim the writer most clearly advances is that

   government is an evil that a person of conscience should refuse to make any use of government is a tool to be judged by whether it is useful, and most of the time it is not the government that governs least is best because a smaller government costs less to run people are not yet fit for self-government and need strong institutions until they become fit

   He endorses no-government only as a future condition, “when men are prepared for it,” and calls government “at best but an expedient”: useful sometimes, which is not the same as evil always. Pushing a writer past his own qualifier is the most common way to misstate a claim.

   Correct. “Expedient” is the word the whole paragraph turns on: it makes government a means rather than a good in itself, so the test becomes usefulness and the verdict follows from the final sentence. The claim is arguable, a reader could hold that government is a good in itself, which is what makes it a thesis.

   Cost never appears; the standard offered is expediency, not economy. A plausible reason for a position the writer holds is still a distractor if the text does not give that reason.

   This inverts the sentence about preparation. Thoreau says people will have no government once they are ready for it, not that they need a strong one until then: the direction of the conditional is the whole point.

3. Which choice best describes the function of the second sentence in the passage above (“Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe…”)?

   It concedes that the motto in the first sentence is impractical and withdraws it. It supplies evidence from the record of a particular government to prove the first sentence. It carries a saying the audience already repeats to its limit, and attaches the writer's own harder position to that limit. It defines a technical term that the rest of the essay will depend on.

   Nothing is withdrawn; the motto is extended rather than abandoned, and the writer says he wants it “acted up to more rapidly.” Reading an extension as a retreat reverses the paragraph's direction.

   No government, year, or number appears anywhere in the sentence. It works by following an accepted premise out to its consequence, which is reasoning rather than evidence, and telling the two apart is much of what function questions test.

   Correct. The first motto was common property among his readers; the second is his, and it arrives as the destination of theirs rather than as a new assertion. That is why the sentence says “which also I believe”: the belief is smuggled in as arithmetic performed on the audience's own saying.

   “Expedient” is the closest thing to a defined term here, and it appears in the next sentence rather than this one. A function question asks what the named part does for the argument, not what the paragraph as a whole contains.

4. In the passage above, the line of reasoning moves from

   a saying the audience already accepts, to its logical extreme, to a general principle that makes both a matter of usefulness a personal anecdote, to the lesson drawn from it, to a recommendation for action a definition of government, to a history of its abuses, to a demand that it be abolished an opponent's objection, to a refutation of that objection, to a concession that softens the refutation

   Correct. Each step earns the next: accepting the familiar motto makes the extreme version its conclusion rather than a new claim, and the closing sentence supplies the standard, expediency, under which both can be judged. Describing that order is what “describe the line of reasoning” asks for.

   The night in jail is famous, but it is not in this paragraph; the opening offers no story at all. Importing what you know about a text instead of reading the printed lines is how reasoning questions go wrong.

   There is no catalogue of abuses and no demand for abolition: the abolition of government is placed in a future when people are prepared for it. A distractor built from a writer's reputation is still a distractor.

   No objection is stated and no opponent appears. The first sentence looks accommodating because it accepts something, but what it accepts is a premise he will use, not a challenge he must answer.

5. In the passage above, the effect of the qualifiers in “most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient” is to

   weaken the claim so far that no reader would have any reason to resist it signal that the writer has not yet decided which governments he means concede that his own government is an exception to the rule he has just stated limit the claim to something almost nobody can deny while still catching every government in it

   A claim can be hedged and still bite. This one leaves every government defective at least sometimes, which is enough to support a duty to judge one's own, so there is plenty left to resist.

   The qualifiers are precise rather than vague: “most … usually” and “all … sometimes” state two different scopes deliberately. Mistaking a careful qualification for indecision is exactly the error the exam tests here.

   The sentence makes his government a member of the class, not an exception: “all governments are sometimes” leaves nothing outside. Exempting the writer's own side would be the opposite of the move being made.

   Correct. The pairing works in two directions at once: the weaker scope (“most … usually”) is hard to dispute, and the universal one (“all … sometimes”) guarantees that no reader can place his own government outside the argument. That is qualification used to strengthen a claim rather than to soften it.

6. In the passage above, the writer's assumptions about his audience are best described as

   that they hold office and can change the policy he objects to that they are hostile to his conclusion and must be answered point by point before they will listen that they already repeat a saying about limited government without having followed it to its end, and can be led there by their own motto that they know nothing about the government's recent conduct and need the facts before any argument can start

   Officeholders would be asked to do something; these readers are asked only to judge. The absence of any request for legislation is the clearest sign of who is being addressed.

   A hostile audience has to be refuted, and nothing here refutes anyone. The opening instead assumes agreement and spends its effort on where that agreement leads, which is a move you make with readers you expect to be friendly.

   Correct. He quotes the motto as something already in circulation, accepts it “heartily,” and then argues that his readers have not taken their own saying seriously enough. The strategy only works on an audience that holds the premise but has not drawn the conclusion.

   No facts about the war, the tax, or any policy are supplied, and the argument does not wait for them. When a writer skips the background, he is telling you he expects an audience that already has it.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about quantitative evidence.

   (1) In 1876 the United States Bureau of Education published a survey of public libraries. (2) It counted 3,682 libraries holding 12,276,964 volumes. (3) The report was important. (4) The Bureau counted only libraries of 300 volumes and upwards that answered its circular. (5) Melvil Dewey helped found the American Library Association in Philadelphia that same year.

   The writer wants to replace sentence 3 with a sentence that states a defensible claim about the survey. Which version of sentence 3 best accomplishes this goal?

   The report was thorough, and it is still impressive to read today. The Bureau's threshold decides what the country looks like, because counting only collections large enough to answer a government circular turns reading into an institutional activity. The report was printed in Washington by the federal government. This paragraph will analyze the Bureau's statistics and explain the purpose behind them.

   “Thorough” and “impressive” are reactions, not claims; there is nothing here a reader could deny and nothing the rest of the paragraph could prove. Swapping one evaluative adjective for another leaves Row A exactly where it was.

   Correct. It is arguable, someone could answer that the threshold was a practical necessity with no effect on the picture, it is specific to this survey, and sentence 4 is already sitting there as its evidence. A thesis that names a choice and its consequence is what a data paragraph needs.

   This is a verifiable fact, which makes it usable evidence and unusable as a thesis. Ask what someone could say back; if the honest answer is “nothing,” you have written a fact.

   Announcing that statistics will be analyzed promises a procedure and commits to no finding. The repair is to state the conclusion the analysis would have reached and let the paragraph defend it.

8. The writer is considering deleting sentence 5 from the draft above. Should the writer make this change?

   Yes, because the founding of a professional association has no bearing on a paragraph about what the survey's numbers count. Yes, because a paragraph should never introduce a person's name after its first sentence. No, because Dewey's involvement in the profession shows that the Bureau's count was accurate. No, because the sentence establishes that 1876 was an eventful year, which supports sentence 3.

   Correct. Sentences 1, 2, and 4 all concern one question, what the Bureau counted and under what definition, and sentence 5 answers a different one. The deletion test is whether the argument loses anything, and here it loses nothing.

   That is an invented rule rather than a reason. New names belong in a paragraph whenever they do work in it; the trouble with this one is that it does none.

   A librarian's activities in the same year say nothing about whether a mailed circular was answered accurately. Treating an association between two facts as support for one of them is a real reasoning error, not a careless one.

   “An eventful year” is not a claim the paragraph makes, and even if it were, a second event in 1876 would not help prove anything about the Bureau's threshold. Relevance is measured against the claim, not against the date.

9. In the draft above, the writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 4 that shows what the Bureau's threshold leaves out of the count. Which of the following, if added after sentence 4, best accomplishes this goal?

   Massachusetts and New York reported larger collections than any other states. There were certainly thousands more libraries in the country than the report admits. The Bureau mailed its circular to every library it was able to identify. A Sunday-school shelf of a hundred volumes, or a village collection that never received the circular, falls outside the count entirely.

   This is drawn from the same table and is perfectly true, but it describes who ranked highest among the libraries that were counted. A true statement about the data is not evidence for a claim about what the data omits.

   “Certainly thousands” asserts a number the writer cannot know and that the source cannot supply: the whole difficulty is that uncounted libraries went uncounted. Evidence that overstates what a source can support weakens a paragraph rather than strengthening it.

   This explains the Bureau's method and even sounds like diligence, which makes it the most tempting wrong answer. Method describes how the count was gathered; the goal asks what the definition excluded.

   Correct. It names two specific kinds of collection that the two stated conditions (three hundred volumes, and a returned circular) would drop, so a reader can see the gap rather than being told there is one. Concrete instances of an omission are the evidence this claim needs.

10. In the draft above, the writer wants sentence 4 to read as a limit on the figures given in sentence 2. Which of the following is the best way to begin sentence 4?

    Therefore, That total is narrower than it looks, because Similarly, For example,

    “Therefore” says the threshold follows from the totals, when the totals in fact follow from the threshold. Reversing cause and effect with a transition is a small word with a large cost.

    Correct. It names the relationship the goal asks for, the definition restricts what the figure covers, and it puts the limit in front of the reader before the explanation arrives. A transition is a logic marker, and here the logic is qualification.

    “Similarly” promises another instance of the same kind of information, and sentence 4 does the opposite: it takes something back from sentence 2. A reader who follows the signpost will misread the paragraph's turn.

    The counting rule is not an example of the totals; it is the condition that produced them. Reserve “for example” for a specific case of a general statement, or it will promise a reader something the next sentence cannot deliver.

Lesson 4.1 · Unit 4 · CED skill 2.A

Introductions: exigence, stake, and a position worth arguing

An introduction has about a hundred words to do three things: make the reader feel a problem, show whom it costs, and commit to a position. “Throughout history, poverty has been an issue” does none of them. Four openings do the work reliably (a scene, a definition, a concession, an arresting claim), and which one fits is a question about the audience.

Lesson 4.2 · Unit 4 · CED skill 2.A

Conclusions: the last move of the argument, not a summary

A conclusion is the last argumentative move, not a receipt for the ones already made. A reader who has just followed the essay does not need it repeated; he needs to know what follows if it is right. Three moves do that work: widen the frame, name the implication, return to the image the introduction opened with.

Lesson 4.3 · Unit 4 · CED skills 5.C and 6.C

Methods of development I: when a story is an argument

A method of development is the shape a writer gives a passage: narration, description, definition, comparison, cause and effect, exemplification. The shape is itself an argument, because it decides what will count as a reason. Narration argues by sequence: this, then this, therefore. Description argues by selection: every detail printed is one chosen over the ones left out.

Lesson 4.4 · Unit 4 · CED skills 5.C and 6.C

Methods of development II: definition and division

Some arguments are settled before the evidence arrives, in the sentence that says what a word will mean here. A writer who gets to define “freedom,” “scholar,” or “success” has set the standard everything after it is measured against. Division works from the other end: cut a whole into parts and you decide which part the reader has to answer for.

Lesson 4.5 · Unit 4 · CED skills 5.C and 6.C

Methods of development III: comparison, analogy, and exemplification

An analogy is an argument in the shape of a picture. Say that a river is a book and you have not described anything; you have asked your reader to import everything true of books (authors, readers, literacy, mastery), and apply it to water. That import is the claim. The question a reader should always ask is which parts came across, and which quietly did not.

Lesson 4.6 · Unit 4 · CED skills 5.C and 6.C

Methods of development IV: cause and effect, problem and solution

Naming a cause looks like reporting and is actually claiming. “Wages fell because immigration rose” is not an observation; it is an argument with at least three rival explanations standing behind it. The problem–solution shape has the same hidden edge: whoever gets to describe the problem has already narrowed the set of remedies that will sound reasonable.

Unit 4 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 4 review: introductions, conclusions, and methods of development

Six reading questions on one passage from Emerson and four revision questions on short student drafts: click an option to see why it is right or wrong, and read every rationale, not just the one for your answer.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” an address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 31, 1837.

   Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

   Which of the following best describes the rhetorical situation of the passage?

   A minister preaching to a congregation that has asked him to defend the habit of reading A private journal entry in which a writer works out his own reading habits for himself A lecturer at a ceremonial college occasion, speaking to an audience whose standing rests on the books he is about to demote A bookseller addressing customers who have already concluded that books are overvalued

   Emerson had left the pulpit five years before this address, and nothing in the source line or the passage indicates a congregation or a request; inventing an occasion the headnote does not support is the most common way to miss a rhetorical-situation item.

   The prose is addressed outward, the questions are asked of listeners and answered for them, and the source line names a society, a place, and a date, all marks of a public occasion rather than a private one.

   Correct. The headnote gives a Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, an annual ceremony that normally flattered the learned men in the room, and the passage tells exactly those men that a book can turn a reader into a satellite. Occasion and audience are in tension, which is what makes the concession in the first sentence necessary.

   Emerson is not selling anything and his audience has not decided against books; his problem is the opposite one, an audience that values books so highly it may not hear a warning about them.

2. In the passage above, which of the following best states Emerson's central claim?

   A book is worth what it starts in the reader, and it does harm at the moment it begins to stand in for the reader's own thinking Books are among the worst things a scholar can own, and the scholar is better off without them A scholar should read widely in the best authors before venturing an opinion of his own The value of a book depends on the reputation and learning of the man who wrote it

   Correct. “They are for nothing but to inspire” fixes the standard, and the satellite sentence names the failure that standard defines: a reader pulled out of his own orbit. Both halves of the first sentence (best used, worst abused) turn on that one criterion.

   This takes half of a conditional and drops the condition. Emerson writes “abused, among the worst,” not “the worst”; the concession that books are also “the best of things, well used” is what keeps the claim defensible.

   This reverses the order Emerson argues for. He puts the active soul first and books second, in a service role, which is why he can say he would rather never see one than be warped by it.

   Authorship never comes up. Emerson locates value in what happens to the reader, which is precisely how he can rank a book the whole audience admires below a reader's own thinking.

3. In the passage above, the two questions, “What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect?”, primarily serve to

   signal that Emerson has not yet settled what he thinks about books replace the question of whether books are good with the question of what they are for, so that the one-sentence answer that follows settles the matter invite the audience to supply answers of their own before Emerson offers his concede that the audience's high view of books is reasonable before he disputes it

   A rhetorical question is asked by a writer who already has the answer; Emerson supplies his in the very next sentence. Reading these as genuine uncertainty is the standard misstep on function questions.

   Correct. The first sentence leaves the audience with a verdict that could go either way, and the questions convert that stalemate into a question of purpose: a question Emerson answers in six words. Changing the question is how he wins it.

   Nothing is left open for the audience. The answer arrives immediately and without qualification, which is the opposite of the pause an invitation would require.

   The concession is real, but it is in the first sentence, not in the questions. Assigning a passage's work to the wrong sentence is a reliable way to lose a function item.

4. In the passage above, which of the following best describes the line of reasoning?

   A principle is stated, defended with an extended example, and then narrowed by a qualification A story is told, a moral is drawn from it, and the moral is applied to the listeners A term is defined, divided into parts, and each part is judged in turn A double verdict is granted, the question is narrowed to purpose, the purpose is answered in one sentence, the answer is tested against an extreme case, and the underlying principle is stated last

   The order runs the other way: the principle, “the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul”, arrives at the end, and nothing after it qualifies anything.

   There is no narrative here. No event is recounted and no sequence of happenings carries the argument, so narration cannot be the method of development.

   Emerson does define the right use of a book, but he never divides books into kinds and never judges the parts separately; division belongs to other passages in the same address, not this one.

   Correct. Track the sentences: concession, two questions, a one-sentence answer, the deliberately extreme “I had better never see a book,” and then the principle. Saving the principle for last is what makes the extreme case read as proof rather than as exaggeration.

5. In the passage above, the comparison of the dependent reader to “a satellite instead of a system” primarily

   displays Emerson's command of the astronomy of his day, lending his address authority with a learned audience suggests that books move in regular paths a careful reader can learn to predict recasts the loss of independence as the loss of a center of one's own, so that borrowing another mind's thinking becomes a change in kind rather than a mild fault softens the charge by conceding that even a dependent reader is still in motion and still learning

   Even if true, a writer's command of a field is not the effect of a comparison on an argument. An answer that describes the author rather than the argument is a true statement that does not answer the question asked.

   The comparison is about the reader, not the book: it is the reader who is warped out of orbit. Assigning the figure to the wrong term is the quickest way to misread an analogy item.

   Correct. A system has its own center and holds other bodies in place; a satellite has neither. The figure converts what sounds like a matter of degree, reading too much of one author, into a difference of kind, which is exactly the severity Emerson's claim needs.

   Motion is not the point of comparison, and a satellite in this figure moves only because something else holds it. The option mistakes a device correctly named for an effect it does not have.

6. In the passage above, Emerson's decision to open by granting that books are “the best of things, well used” most clearly shows an understanding of an audience that

   owes its own standing to books, and would stop listening to a speaker who simply dismissed them has read very little and must first be persuaded that reading matters at all expects a ceremonial address to flatter it and would refuse to hear any criticism whatever consists largely of printers and booksellers with a financial stake in the question

   Correct. Graduates, professors, and clergy hold their positions because of books, so a flat attack would have been dismissed before the argument began. Granting the case for books first buys Emerson the right to describe how they fail.

   The concession would be pointless for such an audience; you do not defend books to people who need convincing that reading is worthwhile. The whole move depends on the audience already agreeing.

   Emerson does criticize them, and hard, so he plainly does not believe criticism is impossible here. The concession buys a hearing for the criticism; it does not replace it.

   The source line names the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a scholarly body. Substituting a commercial motive for the scholarly one changes the audience the passage was actually built for.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Jonathan Swift.

   (1) Jonathan Swift published “A Modest Proposal” anonymously in Dublin in 1729. (2) The pamphlet opens in the voice of a calm, public-spirited planner who is troubled by the beggars he passes in the streets. (3) That calm is the whole trick of the introduction. (4) Readers who had agreed with the opening tone found themselves still agreeing when the proposal arrived. (5) Swift never steps forward to tell them so.

   The writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 3 that supports the claim sentence 3 makes, using specific evidence from the pamphlet. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

   Swift was the Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and wrote many other satires during his career. Satire is a form that says one thing while meaning another, which readers have always found difficult to handle. The tone of the pamphlet stays very calm and reasonable throughout, as any reader notices right away. The projector counts the kingdom's children by the hundred thousand and reckons their weight in pounds, keeping the arithmetic of an ordinary improvement pamphlet while the subject turns monstrous.

   The sentence is true and even relevant to Swift, but biography is not evidence about the pamphlet's tone; a revision question asks what the stated goal requires, and this supplies a fact about the author instead.

   A definition of satire explains a category rather than this text. Evidence must come from the work under discussion, or the claim in sentence 3 is left exactly where it was.

   This repeats sentence 3 in different words. Restatement adds length and no support, and on the exam a revision that only rephrases the claim never accomplishes an add-evidence goal.

   Correct. It points to specific features of the text (the head counts, the weights, the borrowed vocabulary of an improvement scheme), and those details are what make the calm demonstrable rather than asserted.

8. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about the ending of Walden.

   (1) Thoreau went to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, and stayed a little over two years. (2) The book he built out of those years was not published until 1854. (3) Its final chapter drops the ledger of expenses that had filled the opening pages. (4) Furthermore, it states the finding in the third person and in the conditional, so that a rule replaces a record. (5) The pond becomes an instance rather than a model to copy.

   The writer wants the opening of sentence 4 to name the relationship the sentences actually have. Which version of the opening of sentence 4 best accomplishes this goal?

   However, it states the finding in the third person and in the conditional… In its place, it states the finding in the third person and in the conditional… For example, it states the finding in the third person and in the conditional… Therefore, it states the finding in the third person and in the conditional…

   “However” promises a reversal, and sentence 4 reverses nothing in sentence 3: it continues the same observation. A connective that promises the wrong relationship reads to a grader as broken reasoning, not as style.

   Correct. Sentence 3 says what the chapter drops and sentence 4 says what fills the space, so the relationship is substitution. “In its place” names that and lets the reader see the exchange the paragraph is describing.

   “For example” promises that what follows is an instance of what came before, but stating a finding conditionally is not an example of dropping a ledger. The two sentences report two different moves.

   “Therefore” claims that the second sentence follows logically from the first. Dropping the accounts does not cause the shift into the conditional; both are choices Thoreau made, and neither produces the other.

9. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Frederick Douglass.

   (1) In chapter VII of his 1845 Narrative, Douglass explains how he went on learning to read after his mistress was forbidden to teach him. (2) He describes making friends of the white boys he met in the street and converting them into teachers. (3) The paragraph reports tactics rather than suffering. (4) Douglass later founded an antislavery newspaper in Rochester, New York. (5) Because the sequence shows a boy managing adults, a reader who came prepared to pity is handed competence instead.

   The writer is considering deleting sentence 4. Should the writer make this change?

   Yes, because the paragraph's claim is about how Douglass narrates this episode, and his later career supplies no support for that claim. Yes, because the sentence is inaccurate, since Douglass never edited a newspaper of his own. No, because the sentence establishes Douglass's credibility as a writer and so strengthens the argument. No, because a paragraph about the Narrative is incomplete without an account of what Douglass did after slavery.

   Correct. Unity is the test: every sentence must serve the one claim, and the claim here is about the selection of detail in chapter VII. A fact from thirty years later belongs to a different paragraph, however true it is.

   The sentence is accurate, Douglass founded an antislavery paper in Rochester in 1847, so this answer deletes for the wrong reason. Deletion questions turn on relevance to the claim, not on truth.

   Credibility would matter if the paragraph were arguing about Douglass's reliability. It is arguing about how one chapter is built, and nothing about his later work makes that account more persuasive.

   Completeness of a life story is not the standard; the standard is whether the sentence extends this paragraph's claim. Adding biography to satisfy a rule the paragraph never set is how drafts lose unity.

10. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Theodore Roosevelt's “The Man with the Muck-Rake.”

    (1) On April 14, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt borrowed a figure from Bunyan and named the reporter who rakes muck and will not look up. (2) He granted that the filth was real. (3) He granted that raking it was sometimes the most needed service of all. (4) Then he located the harm not in what the journalists printed but in how much of it they printed. (5) So stated, the charge could not be answered with more evidence.

    The writer wants to combine sentences 2 and 3 so that the two concessions land as a single move and the pivot in sentence 4 gains force. Which of the following versions best accomplishes this goal?

    He granted that the filth was real, and he granted that raking it was sometimes the most needed service of all. The filth was real, and raking it was sometimes the most needed service of all. He granted everything the reporters could have asked: the filth was real, and raking it was sometimes the most needed service of all. Although he granted that the filth was real, raking it was sometimes the most needed service of all.

    Joining the two clauses with “and” keeps the repeated “he granted” and adds no emphasis; it is a combination in grammar only, and the pivot in sentence 4 arrives exactly as it did before.

    Dropping “he granted” turns Roosevelt's concessions into the student's own assertions. Losing the attribution costs the paragraph its point, since the whole claim is that Roosevelt chose to concede.

    Correct. Naming the concession as total, everything the other side could have asked, makes the two clauses one move and measures how much ground Roosevelt gives, which is what makes the reversal in sentence 4 land.

    “Although” invents a contrast between two statements that agree. Roosevelt concedes both points on the same side of the argument, so subordinating one to the other misdescribes the reasoning.

Lesson 5.1 · Unit 5 · CED skill 6.A

Commentary: what it is, and what keeps getting mistaken for it

Most paragraphs that lose Row B points are not short of evidence. They are short one sentence: the one after the quotation. Or that slot holds the quotation again in other words. Restating is not commentary. Explaining what a passage means is closer, and still not commentary. Commentary explains how the evidence you just gave makes your claim more likely to be true.

Lesson 5.2 · Unit 5 · CED skill 6.A

Commentary that explains how a choice advances a purpose

There is a sentence shape under every strong rhetorical-analysis paragraph: by doing X, the writer does Y, which serves purpose Z. X is a choice you can point to. Y is what the choice does to the argument. Z is the effect wanted from this audience. The pattern is not a formula to copy into your essay; it is a check that your commentary reached the end.

Lesson 5.3 · Unit 5 · CED skills 5.B and 6.A

Unity and coherence: one idea per paragraph, and how to tell

A paragraph has unity when every sentence belongs to one claim, and coherence when a reader can see how each sentence follows the one before. Most drafts lose unity quietly. A paragraph starts on the writer's reason for choosing a passage, drifts into what the passage says, and ends somewhere else entirely. Nothing in it is wrong. It is just two paragraphs.

Lesson 5.4 · Unit 5 · CED skill 6.B

Transitions: connectives that name a relationship, not decoration

A transition is a claim about the relationship between two sentences. “However” promises a reversal; “therefore” promises that the second thing follows from the first; “granted” promises something is about to be given up and then taken back. A reader believes the promise before reading the sentence, which is why a wrong connective does more damage than none at all.

Lesson 5.5 · Unit 5 · CED skill 5.B

Organization: how the order of the parts carries the reasoning

Order is a prediction about what a reader will accept, and when. A writer facing a friendly audience can put the thesis first and spend the rest proving it. A writer facing an audience that would stop reading at the thesis has to buy the ground first, which is why so many arguments open inside the other side's case.

Lesson 5.6 · Unit 5 · CED skills 6.A and 6.B

Revising for reasoning: reverse-outline, cut, reorder, repair

Revising is not proofreading. You are hunting four failures a reader feels as muddled thinking: a sentence that repeats the one before it, a reason that arrives after the conclusion it was meant to earn, a connective promising a relationship the sentences never perform, and a paragraph that ends in someone else's words.

Unit 5 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 5 review: commentary, unity, and transitions

Six reading questions on one passage from Lincoln and four revision questions on short student drafts: answer each one before you open the rationales, then read all four to see which misreading each distractor was built from.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Abraham Lincoln, address at the Cooper Institute, New York, February 27, 1860.

   Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? … Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

   Which of the following best describes the rhetorical situation of the passage?

   A president in office defending a policy his administration has already put into effect A politician little known in the East, speaking in a city that would help decide his party's nomination, to listeners who needed assurance that he was not a radical A justice writing an opinion that the lower courts will be obliged to apply A pamphleteer writing anonymously for readers who already agree with him

   In February 1860 Lincoln held no office and had not yet been nominated; the speech is an audition, not a defense. Dating a text by its fame rather than by its headnote is the most common rhetorical-situation error.

   Correct. The date sits ten weeks before the Republican convention, the place is New York, and the passage is built to show restraint, slavery let alone where it is, before it shows resolve. Audience and occasion together explain why the concession comes first.

   Nothing here is adjudicating a case or issuing a rule; the passage argues about what voters should do with their votes, which is the work of persuasion, not of judgment.

   The speech was delivered in a hall and printed over Lincoln's name the next morning, and its first move concedes ground, which no writer bothers to do for an audience that already agrees.

2. In the passage above, which of the following best states Lincoln's claim?

   Slavery is wrong and must therefore be abolished wherever in the nation it now exists The question of slavery in the territories should be settled by the voters of each territory Political duty in a republic requires compromise with those who hold opposing views Slavery may be left alone where it already exists, but it must not be allowed to spread into the territories, and voters have a duty to prevent that spread while they still can

   The passage says the opposite about existing slavery: “we can yet afford to let it alone where it is.” Reading a writer's private conviction as his stated claim is how a claim question gets lost.

   Popular sovereignty was the position Lincoln spent the speech opposing. The question in the passage assumes that a national vote can prevent the spread, which is precisely what popular sovereignty denies.

   The closing sentence urges the audience to “dare to do our duty,” not to split the difference; the concession earlier is a limit on the claim, not a call for compromise.

   Correct. The sentence has two halves joined by “but,” and the claim lives in the second: a concession about slavery where it exists, then a refusal about the territories, with “while our votes will prevent it” naming the urgency.

3. In the passage above, the clause “because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation” primarily serves to

   attach a limited, practical reason to the concession, so that leaving slavery alone where it exists reads as a necessity rather than as approval acknowledge that the Constitution obliges the federal government to protect slavery in every state prepare the audience for a demand that slavery be abolished in the states where it is established supply statistics about the number of enslaved people then living in the nation

   Correct. Without the “because” clause the concession would look like indifference; with it, the audience is told the concession is forced by a fact on the ground. That is how a speaker gives ground without giving up the judgment in “Wrong as we think slavery is.”

   The clause names a necessity, not a constitutional obligation, and Lincoln is careful to keep it practical. Upgrading a prudential reason into a legal one changes the argument he was willing to make.

   The clause does the reverse: it is the reason for tolerating slavery where it exists. Distractors that flip the direction of a concession are common and are caught by rereading the sentence around the quoted words.

   No figures appear anywhere in the passage. “Actual presence” is a statement that slavery exists, not a measurement of how much of it there is.

4. In the passage above, which of the following best describes the line of reasoning?

   A term is defined, three examples are given, and a conclusion is drawn from the examples A sequence of events is narrated and a moral is drawn from the way it ended A concession is made with its reason attached, a contrasting question marks the limit of that concession, and a closing charge asks the audience to act on the distinction the question draws A series of questions is raised and then deliberately left unanswered so the audience will keep weighing them

   No term is defined and no examples are listed. Choosing a familiar shape that the passage does not have is easier to avoid if you name the job of each clause before you look at the options.

   Nothing is narrated; there are no events in sequence. The passage argues about what to do next, which is a different method of development from narration.

   Correct. Clause by clause: concede, give the reason, turn on “but,” ask the question that fixes the limit, then charge the audience to act. The order matters, because the concession is what earns a hearing for the refusal that follows.

   There is one question, and its answer is obvious from the way it is framed, then the last sentence tells the audience what to do about it. An unanswered question would leave no duty to dare.

5. In the passage above, Lincoln's decision to put the second half of the first sentence as a question rather than as a statement primarily

   signals that he has not decided how far his party should go and is asking his listeners to settle it makes the audience supply the answer itself, so that the limit on the concession arrives as the listeners' own conclusion rather than as the speaker's demand softens the tone of the passage so that Southern readers will not feel accused of anything postpones the argument in order to leave room for the evidence he intends to present afterward

   The closing sentence rules this out: a speaker who charges an audience to “dare to do our duty” has decided. The form is a rhetorical question, and rhetorical questions are asked by people who know the answer.

   Correct. A statement would have given the audience something to accept or refuse; a question makes them complete the argument, and a listener who has just answered “no” for himself is harder to talk back out of it.

   Naming the territories and the free states as things slavery would “overrun” is not softening. The concession earlier in the sentence does the reassuring; the question does the pressing.

   The question is the argument, not a delay before it. An answer that treats a choice as merely postponing something is worth suspecting, since every sentence in a speech has to earn its place.

6. In the passage above, the phrase “while our votes will prevent it” most clearly shows an understanding of an audience that

   believes change can come only by force and must be talked out of that belief has no lawful means of acting and therefore has to be roused to protest consists of slaveholders who need reassurance that their property is safe holds the ballot as its instrument and can be moved by the warning that the chance to use it will not last

   Force is nowhere in the passage, and the sentence offers voting as the remedy rather than arguing against violence. An answer has to be built from what the words assume, not from what the era contained.

   The phrase says the opposite: these listeners have votes, and the whole appeal depends on it. A passage aimed at the powerless would not make the ballot the hinge of the sentence.

   The audience is a hall of New York Republicans. Reassurance is offered about slavery where it already exists, but it is offered to voters who think slavery wrong, not to the people who hold enslaved people.

   Correct. “Our votes” names the audience's own instrument and “while” puts a clock on it, so the appeal is not only that they are right but that they are in a position to act and will not be forever.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Virginia Woolf.

   (1) In 1924 Virginia Woolf published “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” an essay grown out of a lecture. (2) In it she invents an elderly woman she calls Mrs. Brown, glimpsed in a railway carriage. (3) Woolf says something about three famous novelists of the previous generation. (4) Each of them, she argues, would give us the carriage, the rent, and the condition of England, and never the woman herself. (5) The reader watches all three walk past her.

   The writer wants sentence 3 to state a claim that the rest of the paragraph can be used to prove. Which version of sentence 3 best accomplishes this goal?

   Woolf did not enjoy the novels of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. Woolf discusses three famous novelists of the previous generation at some length in the essay. By testing three famous novelists against a passenger who appears in none of their books, Woolf turns a matter of taste into a demonstration her readers can run for themselves. Three famous novelists of the previous generation were extremely popular with readers in 1924.

   A preference is not a defensible claim, and this one is about Woolf's feelings rather than about her argument. It also cannot be proved by sentences 4 and 5, which describe what her method shows.

   This announces a topic rather than making a claim. Nobody could disagree with it, and a sentence nobody can disagree with gives the rest of the paragraph nothing to support.

   Correct. It is arguable, it names the choice the paragraph goes on to describe, the invented passenger, and sentences 4 and 5 are exactly the proof it needs. A claim a paragraph can prove is a claim written to fit the evidence already on the page.

   The popularity of the novelists is a fact, and a relevant one, but a fact is not arguable. Notice too that the paragraph never returns to it, which is the quickest test of a topic sentence.

8. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about G. K. Chesterton.

   (1) In “The Fallacy of Success,” published in 1908, Chesterton attacks a whole shelf of popular books. (2) Chivalry is about chivalry. (3) Religion is about religion. (4) The success manuals, he says, are about nothing at all. (5) The charge is not that the books are bad but that they have no subject.

   The writer wants to combine sentences 2, 3, and 4 so that the parallel structure carries the argument and the last item lands hardest. Which of the following versions best accomplishes this goal?

   Chivalry is about chivalry; religion is about religion; and although the success manuals sold in enormous numbers, Chesterton says they are about nothing at all. Books about chivalry, religion, and success all have subjects of their own, according to Chesterton. Books about chivalry are about chivalry, books about religion are about religion, and books about success, he says, are about nothing at all. Although chivalry is about chivalry and religion is about religion, the success manuals are about nothing at all.

   The added clause about sales breaks the pattern right before the payoff and buries the third item in a subordinate structure. A combination that interrupts the parallel at the last term defeats the stated goal.

   This contradicts sentences 4 and 5, which say the success books have no subject at all. A revision must be accurate to the paragraph as well as well-formed.

   Correct. The three clauses take one shape, so the reader hears the pattern and expects the third to complete it, and “about nothing at all” breaks the expectation the first two set. The parallel is what makes the last item hit.

   Subordinating the first two items with “although” demotes exactly the material whose repetition creates the effect. Coordination equalizes and subordination ranks, and here the argument needs the items to be equal.

9. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Jane Addams.

   (1) Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House on Chicago's Near West Side in 1889. (2) In the chapter of her 1910 memoir on the subjective necessity for social settlements, Addams argues that a settlement answers a need in the people who run it. (3) She puts the settlers' own restlessness first and the neighborhood second. (4) That order is a concession to readers who distrust charity. (5) By the time the neighborhood arrives, the reader has already granted that somebody must go.

   The writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 3 that supports sentence 3 with specific evidence from the chapter. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

   Hull-House eventually grew to include a gymnasium, a coffee house, a boys' club, and a kindergarten. The chapter plainly places the settlers before the neighborhood, as any reader who opens it can see. Addams became one of the best-known reformers in the United States and was widely honored in later life. The chapter opens on a generation of educated young people trained for work nobody has given them anything to do with, and treats that stalled energy as a social fact rather than a private complaint.

   The list is accurate and interesting, but it describes the institution rather than the chapter's arrangement, and the claim in sentence 3 is about arrangement. Relevant subject matter is not the same as relevant evidence.

   This asserts the claim again and calls it obvious. “As any reader can see” is a sign that a sentence is repeating rather than proving.

   Reputation is a fact about Addams's career, not support for a claim about how one chapter is built. Watch for options that make a writer more impressive instead of making the claim more likely.

   Correct. It shows what actually stands in the chapter's opening position and characterizes it, which is exactly what a claim about order needs. Evidence for a claim about structure has to come from the structure.

10. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address.

    (1) Jefferson delivered his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1801, after an election the House settled on its thirty-sixth ballot. (2) He opens by asking for something no defeated party could refuse, that the country unite with one heart and one mind. (3) Only then does he concede the point actually in dispute, that a difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. (4) The new capital was still half-built, and many members of Congress lodged in boarding houses. (5) Because that ground is conceded first, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists” arrives as a conclusion rather than as an order.

    The writer is considering deleting sentence 4. Should the writer make this change?

    Yes, because the paragraph's claim concerns the order in which Jefferson makes his concessions, and the condition of the capital does nothing to advance it. Yes, because the detail is inaccurate, since Washington had been completed well before the inauguration of 1801. No, because the sentence supplies context about the occasion that helps a reader picture the scene. No, because without it the paragraph never explains why the election had to be decided in the House.

    Correct. Sentences 2, 3, and 5 all track sequence, and sentence 4 tracks architecture; it interrupts a chain of reasoning the reader is meant to follow. A deletion question asks whether a sentence extends the paragraph's one claim, not whether it is interesting.

    The detail is accurate, the capital was famously unfinished in 1801, so this deletes for a reason that does not exist. Deleting true material is fine, but the reason must be relevance.

    Atmosphere is not the paragraph's business here; the claim is about arrangement, and a picturesque detail between two links of an argument makes the argument harder to follow rather than easier.

    The paragraph does not need to explain the thirty-sixth ballot, and sentence 4 would not explain it if it did. Boarding houses have nothing to do with how the House broke the tie.

Lesson 6.1 · Unit 6 · CED skills 1.A and 3.A

Perspective: the view from where the writer is standing

Every writer writes from somewhere: a job, a region, a party, a paycheck. That position is not a defect to be scrubbed out before an argument can be trusted; it is what makes some evidence obvious to this writer and other evidence invisible. So “the author is biased” is a dead end. The live question is narrower: what does standing here let this writer see, and what does it let him walk past?

Lesson 6.2 · Unit 6 · CED skills 3.A and 5.A

Bias as a pattern of choices: selection and omission

Bias is not an insult you throw at a text you dislike. Treat it as a pattern you can point to, and it becomes evidence: which facts a writer counts, which words are attached to them, what the subject gets compared to, and what never comes up at all. The last one is hardest, because an omission leaves no mark on the page. You find it by asking what a reader on the other side would have put there.

Lesson 6.3 · Unit 6 · CED skills 3.A and 5.A

One record, two arguments: how framing decides what counts

Brown and Harlan had the same statute in front of them, the same record, the same Fourteenth Amendment, the same railroad car. They disagree about almost no facts. What separates them is the question each decided the case was about, and that question, settled before any evidence is weighed, is what makes a fact central in one opinion and irrelevant in the other.

Lesson 6.4 · Unit 6 · CED skills 7.A and 3.A

Loaded language: connotation, euphemism, and the label on the actor

Denotation is what a word points at; connotation is what it drags along behind it. Two words can point at the same man, “monarch” and “crowned ruffian”, and neither is false. The second has simply decided the argument before any evidence arrives. Loaded language is not lying, which is why it is worth analyzing rather than merely catching.

Lesson 6.5 · Unit 6 · CED skills 4.C and 2.B

Steel-manning: stating the position you are about to criticize

The straw man is tempting because it is easy to knock over and because your own side enjoys watching it fall. It costs you the only reader worth having: the one who holds the view and can tell you have not described it. The repair is a rule: state the other position in a form its holders would sign, then argue against that version.

Unit 6 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 6 review: position, perspective, and bias

Six reading questions on one passage from Harlan's dissent and four revision questions on short student drafts: the reading items reward naming what a writer's position lets him treat as settled, so decide that before you look at the options.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, Supreme Court of the United States, May 18, 1896.

   The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

   Which of the following best describes the rhetorical situation of the passage?

   A legislator arguing for a bill in the days before it comes to a vote An editor writing for subscribers who already share his view of the case A justice writing for a majority of the Court and settling a rule the country must follow A lone dissenting justice writing on the day his colleagues ruled against him, for the lawyers and courts who will have to apply the majority's rule, and for readers who come later

   No bill is before anyone; the passage responds to a decision already made by a court. An argument written after the vote has different work to do from one written before.

   A dissent is addressed first to the people who must live with the ruling, including those who disagree with the writer. Nothing in the passage assumes agreement: the long concession at the start assumes the opposite.

   The headnote says “dissenting,” and Harlan wrote alone against seven. Reading a dissent as the Court's holding inverts everything about its purpose, which is to argue rather than to instruct.

   Correct. He has lost, so he cannot command; he can only make the strongest record of the objection. That is why the passage spends three sentences granting his opponents' premise before it states a principle it has no power to enforce.

2. In the passage above, which of the following best states Harlan's claim?

   The advantages one race holds in wealth and education are the natural result of superior ability Whatever dominance one race holds in fact, the Constitution recognizes no ruling class of citizens and so cannot support a law that sorts them by race Laws separating the races should be struck down because they are impossible to enforce fairly The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to secure political equality but not social equality

   Harlan concedes the dominance as a fact and says nothing about its cause; he attaches its continuance to a condition, not to ability. Treating a concession as an endorsement is the standard trap in this passage.

   Correct. The pivot on “But” separates what is true in society from what is true under law, and everything after it (no ruling class, no caste, a color-blind Constitution) states the legal proposition the dissent rests on.

   Practicality never comes up. Harlan's objection is that the law contradicts a constitutional principle, which is a different and stronger ground than difficulty of administration.

   That distinction belongs to the majority opinion Harlan is answering. Attaching an opponent's position to the writer is easy to do when both texts concern the same amendment, and rereading the pivot prevents it.

3. In the passage above, the first three sentences primarily serve to

   prove that one race is in fact superior, a proposition the rest of the passage then qualifies establish the writer's expertise in the history of the country's racial arrangements grant, in the fullest terms available, the social fact his opponents would rely on, so that his constitutional objection cannot be answered simply by asserting that fact present evidence about prestige, education, and wealth that the opinion goes on to weigh against other evidence

   Nothing here is offered as proof of superiority; “deems itself” reports a belief and the list that follows reports a distribution of prestige and power. A concession describes a state of affairs, it does not justify it.

   Credentials are not the issue in a signed judicial opinion, and no historical authority is claimed. An answer that makes a passage about the writer instead of about the argument is almost always off.

   Correct. By conceding dominance at maximum strength, Harlan removes it from the dispute; an opponent who replies that the white race is dominant has said only what Harlan has already said. The concession is what makes the pivot unanswerable on those terms.

   No weighing happens. The passage does not compare this evidence with any other; it changes the standard of judgment, which is a different move from balancing evidence.

4. In the passage above, which of the following best describes the line of reasoning?

   A concession is stated at maximum strength, a turn moves the question from social fact to constitutional law, and the principle is stated flatly once the turn has been made A term is defined, a series of examples illustrates it, and precedent is invoked to settle the matter The passage of the statute is narrated and its likely effects are then predicted A chain of rhetorical questions narrows the issue until only one answer remains available

   Correct. Sentences one through three concede, “But” turns, and sentences four through six declare. Notice that the declarations get shorter as they go: the reasoning has already been done by the turn, so the principle needs no defense.

   No precedent is cited and no term is formally defined. “Caste” is used as a conclusion, not built up from examples.

   The statute's history appears nowhere in this passage, and no prediction is made except the conditional one in the third sentence, which belongs to the concession.

   There are no questions at all. Every sentence is declarative, which is part of the effect: a dissent that has lost the vote gains force by asserting rather than asking.

5. In the passage above, the paired phrases “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law” primarily

   change the standard of judgment from what is true in society to what is true under law, so that everything conceded in the first three sentences becomes beside the point concede that the law has so far failed to live up to the Constitution's promises suggest that the Court ought to consider public opinion alongside the constitutional text supply ornament through repetition without altering the argument

   Correct. Prestige, wealth, and power are real and, in the eye of the law, irrelevant. Framing is what decides relevance, and these two phrases are where the frame changes.

   The passage says what the law does recognize, not what it has failed to do. A concession of failure would weaken the flat declarations that follow.

   Public opinion is what the phrases exclude. Harlan has just described the social standing of the races and is now setting it outside the question.

   The phrases are repetitive in form, but the repetition insists on a single standard twice over, and the sentence turns on it. Naming a device correctly and then assigning it no effect is the most frequent way to miss an effect question.

6. In the passage above, Harlan's decision to concede dominance “in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power” most clearly shows an understanding of an audience that

   holds no settled view about race and needs the relevant facts before it can judge takes that dominance for granted, and would stop reading an argument that began by denying it is hostile to the Constitution and must first be persuaded of its authority consists of the plaintiff and his lawyers, who need encouragement after losing the case

   A neutral audience would not need the concession at all; you concede what your readers already believe. The length and force of the list are the measure of how firmly he expects them to hold it.

   Correct. These are lawyers, judges, and legislators in 1896, and the fact Harlan grants is the one they would have raised first. Granting it costs him nothing he needs and buys him a hearing for the sentence that begins “But.”

   His audience is composed of people whose work is applying the Constitution; their authority and its authority are the same. The dispute is over what it requires, not over whether it binds.

   A dissent is written for the people who must apply the rule and for later courts, not as consolation for the losing party. Consolation would not require conceding anything at all.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Mark Twain.

   (1) Mark Twain wrote “Corn-Pone Opinions” in 1901 and left it unpublished; it appeared in 1923, thirteen years after his death. (2) The essay grants at the start that men really do think about great political questions. (3) Similarly, it says that they think with their party rather than independently. (4) The verbs then thin into herd motion — they swarm, they feel, they follow. (5) A partisan reader has granted the premise before the charge arrives.

   The writer wants the opening of sentence 3 to name the relationship between sentences 2 and 3. Which version of the opening of sentence 3 best accomplishes this goal?

   For instance, it says that they think with their party rather than independently. Consequently, it says that they think with their party rather than independently. It adds at once, however, that they think with their party rather than independently. In other words, it says that they think with their party rather than independently.

   “For instance” promises an example of the previous sentence, but thinking with one's party is not an instance of thinking; it is a limit placed on it. The connective would promise the reader a relationship the sentences never perform.

   “Consequently” claims that the second statement follows from the first. Twain's point is that men think and yet do not think independently, which is a qualification rather than a consequence.

   Correct. Sentence 2 concedes and sentence 3 takes most of the concession back, so the relationship is contrast, and “at once” records how quickly the limit arrives, which is the move sentence 5 depends on.

   “In other words” announces a restatement, and these two sentences say different things: one grants that men think, the other says whose thinking it is. A restatement marker over a qualification hides the very turn the paragraph is about.

8. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Thomas Paine.

   (1) Thomas Paine published “Common Sense” anonymously in Philadelphia in January 1776. (2) Paine uses some very strong words for kings. (3) He never argues that kings are ruffians; he supplies the noun and moves on. (4) Set beside “one honest man,” the phrase “crowned ruffians” makes the crown decoration on a criminal rather than a source of authority. (5) A reader who accepts the noun has nothing left to respect.

   The writer wants sentence 2 to state a defensible claim that sentences 3 through 5 support. Which version of sentence 2 best accomplishes this goal?

   Paine was an English immigrant of about a year's standing when he wrote the pamphlet. Paine uses a great deal of strong and colorful diction all through the pamphlet. Paine's nouns do work his evidence never has to do, settling what a king is before any argument about monarchy has begun. Many readers in January 1776 still thought of themselves as loyal subjects of the king.

   Biography is not a claim about the text, and none of the following sentences bears on Paine's citizenship. The detail is true, relevant to a different paragraph, and useless here.

   “Strong diction” labels without claiming anything about what the diction does, so nothing in the paragraph can support or refute it. On the exam this is the classic device-naming sentence offered in place of a claim.

   Correct. It is arguable, it names a specific effect of word choice, and sentences 3 through 5 are the proof: no argument, a supplied noun, and a reader with nothing left to respect. A claim a paragraph can prove is one written to fit the evidence in hand.

   This is real context and would help elsewhere, but it is a fact about readers rather than an arguable statement about Paine's choices, and sentences 3 through 5 do not prove it.

9. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson.

   (1) Writing for a seven-to-one Court in 1896, Justice Brown called the plaintiff's argument an “underlying fallacy.” (2) The phrase converts a disputed question — what a separation law means — into an error in reasoning, which needs no evidence to settle. (3) The opinion then places the badge of inferiority in what the plaintiff chooses to see. (4) Homer Plessy's arrest had been arranged by a New Orleans committee in order to create a test case. (5) With the meaning moved into the passenger's head, the law's effects can be filed under instincts no court is obliged to examine.

   The writer is considering deleting sentence 4. Should the writer make this change?

   Yes, because the detail is inaccurate, since Plessy was arrested by chance rather than by arrangement. No, because the sentence shows that the case was deliberately brought, which is essential background for any discussion of the ruling. No, because without it the paragraph never identifies the plaintiff by name. Yes, because the paragraph's claim is about how the opinion's language relocates the injury, and the circumstances of the arrest do not bear on that claim.

   The detail is accurate, a New Orleans committee organized the arrest to create a test case, so deleting it for inaccuracy would be deleting for a reason that does not exist. Relevance, not truth, is the test.

   The background is genuinely useful in an essay about the case, which is exactly what makes this distractor tempting. This paragraph, though, is about three moves inside the opinion's prose, and sentence 4 breaks that chain between 3 and 5.

   Naming the plaintiff is not a requirement the paragraph has set for itself, and a paragraph analyzing an opinion's language can refer to “the plaintiff” throughout without loss.

   Correct. Sentences 1, 2, 3, and 5 trace one continuous movement (fallacy, then perception, then instinct), and sentence 4 belongs to the history of the litigation. Unity asks whether a sentence extends the one claim, however interesting it is on its own.

10. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Frederick Douglass.

    (1) On April 14, 1876, at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Washington, Frederick Douglass both praised Lincoln and judged him, in the same speech. (2) President Grant and much of the government sat in front of him, and the monument had been paid for largely by subscriptions from formerly enslaved people. (3) Douglass keeps his standing with both halves of that audience by naming the measure before he delivers the verdict. (4) Neither half is asked to pretend.

    The writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 3 that supports sentence 3 with specific evidence from the oration. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

    Douglass had met Lincoln at the White House more than once and had pressed him about the pay of Black soldiers. Measured “from the genuine abolition ground,” Douglass says, Lincoln seemed tardy and cold; measured by the sentiment of a country a statesman was bound to consult, he was swift and radical. The oration is widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of American public speaking of its century. Douglass had been born into slavery in Maryland and escaped in 1838, nearly forty years before this occasion.

    The meetings are true and show that Douglass knew Lincoln, but sentence 3 claims something about how the speech is built. Evidence for a claim about method has to come from the method.

    Correct. It quotes the two stated standards and the two verdicts that follow from them, which is precisely what “naming the measure before he delivers the verdict” asserts. The evidence and the claim describe the same sentence of the oration.

    Praise for the speech is an evaluation, not evidence, and it would support any claim about the oration equally well, which is another way of saying it supports none of them.

    Douglass's own history matters to the occasion and could open a different paragraph, but it says nothing about the order in which he places a standard and a judgment inside the speech.

Lesson 7.1 · Unit 7 · CED skills 4.C and 3.C

Qualification: the modifiers that decide how much you have to prove

A claim with no limits on it is the easiest kind to beat. “Reform movements succeed when outsiders lead them” loses to one insider. Add a qualifier (often, before the Civil War, for movements without money), and the sentence claims less and holds more. That trade is the skill; it fails only when the limit leaves nothing to argue about.

Lesson 7.2 · Unit 7 · CED skills 3.C and 4.C

Concession: grant the fact, keep the argument

Conceding looks like losing ground, and students avoid it for that reason. It is closer to choosing which ground to fight on. You grant the part of the other case that is true, which costs you a fact you could not have beaten anyway, and you buy the attention of a reader who came in braced for a writer who would pretend that fact away.

Lesson 7.3 · Unit 7 · CED skill 4.C

Counterargument and rebuttal: answering the objection that could stop you

Most student counterarguments are built to lose. “Some might say the author is boring, but he is not” answers nobody. The objection worth printing is the one that would sink your claim if it were true: and once you have stated it that honestly, you owe the reader a specific route out, not a shrug.

Lesson 7.4 · Unit 7 · CED skill 6.A

Sophistication: the four routes to Row C, and the phrases that fake it

Row C is worth one point and most essays do not get it. It is not awarded for long words or a grand last paragraph. It is awarded when an essay does something its own argument made necessary, and a reader can usually tell within a paragraph whether the complexity was discovered or bolted on.

Lesson 7.5 · Unit 7 · CED skills 4.B and 4.C

Writing it: a qualified thesis, then the paragraph that concedes and pivots

Now you produce the unit's two sentences. A flat thesis says what happened; a qualified thesis says under what conditions it happened, which is the version a reader can test. The concession paragraph then does in a paragraph what the thesis did in a clause: it grants the opposing fact and keeps the claim.

Unit 7 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 7 review: qualification, concession, and complexity

Six reading questions on one passage from Booker T. Washington and four revision questions on short student drafts: answer each item before you open the rationales, then read all four to see which misreading every distractor was built from.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Booker T. Washington, address at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895; earlier in the speech he has told of a ship in distress whose signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

   To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” … In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

   Which of the following best describes the rhetorical situation the passage has to manage?

   A speaker invited to represent a single constituency, whose only task is to state that group's demands plainly A speaker addressing listeners who already accept his position, so that the occasion calls for celebration rather than persuasion A Black speaker at a Southern civic ceremony, addressing in the same sentences members of his own race, the white Southerners whose cooperation he is asking for, and the Northern visitors the exposition was built to attract A speaker whose audience is entirely Northern, so that the Southern white man is a figure discussed rather than a listener addressed

   The passage speaks past its immediate addressees at every turn: the people named in the first clause are not the people whose “friendly relations” are being negotiated. An audience analysis that names one group cannot explain why the sentences have to be built this way.

   Ceremonial occasions often do call for celebration, which is what makes this the tempting answer. Washington is asking groups with different interests to accept one arrangement, and the fences he builds around every claim are the evidence that he expects resistance.

   Correct. The first sentence turns toward Black Southerners weighing emigration, the second sets the terms on which two races will share a region, and the occasion, an exposition staged to draw Northern capital South, seats investors in the same hall. Every audience hears every word, which is why the claim is fenced twice in a single sentence.

   Third-person reference is not absence: the Southern white man is called “their next-door neighbor” because Washington is describing him to one part of the audience while he sits in another part of it. Mistaking who is in the room is the fastest way to misjudge the constraints on a speech.

2. In the passage above, which of the following best states Washington's claim about separation between the races?

   Separation is granted in the limited domain he calls purely social and refused wherever a matter is essential to mutual progress Separation should end first in social life and only later in the life of work, once the two races have learned to trust each other Separation is a temporary arrangement that will end as soon as Black Southerners acquire property and skill Separation is required by nature, since the fingers of a hand are separate by design

   Correct. “Purely social” names the domain in which he grants separation and “all things essential to mutual progress” names the domain in which he refuses it. The sentence is a boundary, and those two phrases are its posts.

   This reverses his order. Washington gives the social sphere away first and holds the sphere of work and progress, and no sentence here proposes that the trade will later be undone.

   The excerpt names no condition and no end date. The timetable belongs to other parts of Washington's program and to his critics' readings of it, and importing a claim from outside the passage is the standard way to lose a claim question.

   The figure describes an arrangement rather than a law of nature, and he applies it to what the two races “can” do, not to what they must. Reading a simile as a proof is how analogies get overweighted.

3. In the passage above, Washington's decision to open by addressing “those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land” primarily serves to

   concede that emigration has already succeeded for many, so that his advice arrives too late to be a rebuke establish that his quarrel is with Northern critics of the South rather than with anyone in the hall warn his white listeners that Black Southerners will leave the region if conditions do not improve answer a competing plan inside his own community first, so that the counsel that follows reads as advice he gives his own people rather than as terms accepted under pressure

   Nothing in the sentence grants that emigration has worked; “depend on” describes a hope, not a result. A concession has to give away something the other side actually holds.

   Northern critics are neither named nor answered here, and the sentence is addressed to Washington's own race. Assigning an address to a group the passage never mentions is a reliable way to miss a function item.

   Departure would be leverage if he were threatening it, which is what makes this reading tempting. He is arguing against emigration instead, so the sentence spends that leverage rather than holding it over anyone.

   Correct. He puts the strongest rival plan for his own community on the table and redirects it in his own voice, so that when “friendly relations with the Southern white man” arrives it is counsel he has already given his people. Placing the counterargument first is what keeps the advice from sounding like a condition someone else imposed.

4. In the passage above, the comparison of the two races to the fingers and the hand primarily

   proves that social separation is natural, since fingers are separate by design and function best that way lets one image carry both halves of the claim at once, division and union in the same body, so that a bargain about how much separation to allow looks like a description of something already whole softens the demand by admitting that the two races can never be genuinely joined displays Washington's command of figurative language before an audience that expected plain speech from him

   The figure is offered as something the races “can” do, not as an anatomical fact about them. A comparison illustrates a proposal; it cannot prove one, and treating it as proof is the usual overreading of an analogy.

   Correct. A hand is one body whose fingers are already apart, so the concession in the first half and the demand in the second arrive as two descriptions of a single thing. The image converts a negotiated arrangement into an observation about a whole that exists already.

   The hand is the point of the figure (one, in all things essential), so the image insists on union rather than denying it. Reading only the first half of an analogy is how its argument gets reversed.

   Skill with figurative language is a fact about the speaker, not an effect on the argument. A true statement about the author is the classic wrong answer to a question about what a device does.

5. In the passage above, the qualifier “purely” in “all things that are purely social” does which of the following?

   It narrows the class of matters in which separation is granted, leaving anything social that also bears on work, schooling, or law outside the concession It intensifies the concession, granting separation in social life more completely than a plainer phrasing would It signals that Washington considers social questions trivial and beneath the occasion It hedges the sentence so heavily that no disputable claim is left in it

   Correct. Ask what a qualifier excludes: “purely social” excludes every social matter that also touches wages, schooling, or law, which is most of what a listener would have meant by the word. The concession is far narrower than it first sounds, and that narrowing is the sentence's work.

   “Purely” does the opposite of intensifying: it shrinks the class of things covered. Treating limiting words as emphasis is the most common misreading on qualification items.

   Nothing here disparages social life, and he grants separation in that sphere rather than dismissing the subject. Connotation has to be read against what the sentence is actually doing.

   A hedge that left nothing disputable would be evasion, but this one draws a line a listener can accept or refuse: separation here, none there. The test is whether a qualifier excludes something, and this one excludes a great deal.

6. In the passage above, which of the following best describes the line of reasoning?

   A general principle is stated, illustrated with an anecdote, and then applied to the listeners An opposing position is stated fairly, refuted with evidence, and replaced with a better-supported claim A term is defined, divided into its parts, and each part is judged in turn A rival plan is addressed and turned around, a borrowed sentence supplies what to do instead, and one figure then fixes how much separation the alternative permits and how much it forbids

   No general principle opens the excerpt and no story is told inside it; the borrowed sentence arrives as counsel, not as an illustration of a rule already laid down.

   No evidence is brought against emigration at all. Washington redirects the plan instead of disproving it, and mistaking redirection for refutation costs you the distinctive move of the passage.

   He does sort human affairs into two classes, the purely social and the essential to mutual progress, but he defines neither term and judges both in the same clause, so division cannot be the shape of the reasoning.

   Correct. Follow the order: the emigration plan is met and turned, the quoted sentence says what to do in its place, and the hand fixes the limits of that alternative. The reasoning ends on a boundary rather than on a proof, which is what makes the qualifiers the most important words in it.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Mary Wollstonecraft.

   (1) Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. (2) Her case for educating women runs through a claim about virtue rather than through a claim about rights alone. (3) Wollstonecraft argues that women are kept ignorant. (4) She grants that men may be the stronger sex and then denies that strength settles anything about virtue. (5) That concession is what lets her ask for a single standard instead of two.

   The writer wants to revise sentence 3 so that it states the claim the rest of the paragraph actually supports. Which version best accomplishes this goal?

   Wollstonecraft argues that women have always been kept ignorant by men in every society. Wollstonecraft argues that the ignorance she describes is produced by an education designed for the drawing room, not by any natural difference in women's capacity for virtue. Wollstonecraft may perhaps suggest that women's education could in some ways have had an effect on their situation. Wollstonecraft argues that women are kept ignorant, a problem that still matters to readers today.

   “Always” and “every society” make the claim larger and easier to beat, since one counterexample ends it. A revision that strips the limits off a thesis moves in exactly the wrong direction.

   Correct. Sentences 4 and 5 turn on a single standard of virtue and on what nature does not settle, so a thesis that locates the cause of ignorance in schooling rather than in nature is the claim the paragraph goes on to defend.

   Four hedges stacked in one sentence, “may perhaps,” “could,” “in some ways”, leave nothing a reader could dispute, and a sentence no one can refuse is not a thesis. Qualification limits a claim; it does not dissolve one.

   Present-day relevance is not a qualification. The sentence still asserts only that women were kept ignorant, and the added clause changes no condition, degree, or domain.

8. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July oration.

   (1) On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass spoke at Corinthian Hall in Rochester to an audience that had invited him to mark the Fourth. (2) He spends the opening of the speech praising the founders as brave and great men. (3) None of that praise is withdrawn later. (4) For example, he asks what the Fourth of July is to the American slave, and the question measures the holiday by a standard his listeners have already accepted. (5) A holiday he had belittled could have indicted no one.

   The writer wants the opening of sentence 4 to name the relationship the sentences actually have. Which version of the opening of sentence 4 best accomplishes this goal?

   However, he asks what the Fourth of July is to the American slave… For example, he asks what the Fourth of July is to the American slave… On that footing, he asks what the Fourth of July is to the American slave… Therefore, he asks what the Fourth of July is to the American slave…

   “However” promises that sentence 4 will cut against sentence 3, and it does not: the praise left standing is the very thing the question uses. A connective that misnames a relationship reads to a grader as broken reasoning, not as style.

   An example relationship would require sentence 4 to be an instance of what sentence 3 describes, and a question about the slave is not an instance of praise going unwithdrawn. It is the use Douglass makes of that fact.

   Correct. Sentence 3 establishes the ground, the praise still stands, and sentence 4 shows him arguing from it, which is exactly what sentence 5 confirms by naming what a belittled holiday could not have done. Naming the footing is the work this transition has.

   “Therefore” claims the question follows logically from the praise, but keeping the praise intact does not produce the question; it makes the question usable. Enabling and entailing are different relationships, and only one of them holds here.

9. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Susan B. Anthony.

   (1) After she was arrested in 1872 for voting in Rochester, Susan B. Anthony carried her defense through the county where she was to be tried, until the trial was moved to a neighboring one. (2) Her lecture asked whether it was a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote. (3) She never disputes the facts: she voted, and she meant the law to be tested. (4) She argues instead that the facts the prosecution can prove do not amount to the crime it names.

   The writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 4 that names the rebuttal route Anthony takes and explains why it was the one available to her. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

   Because the vote itself was never in dispute, denying the evidence was closed to her, and she could only grant every fact and deny the inference that a citizen's ballot became a crime when the citizen was a woman. She was fined one hundred dollars at the end of the trial and never paid a cent of it. People in this period disagreed sharply about whether women should be permitted to vote at all. Anthony insists that the objection to her vote is simply unconvincing and that no reasonable person could accept it.

   Correct. Granting the act and disputing what the act amounts to is the deny-the-inference route, and the sentence also says why the other routes were shut: with the facts admitted, there was no evidence left to attack.

   The fine is real (one hundred dollars, which she refused to pay), but the outcome of the trial says nothing about how her argument was built. A true detail that supports no claim in the paragraph is still a digression.

   Period-wide disagreement is background that would fit almost any paragraph about suffrage, which is another way of saying it supports none of them. Evidence has to bear on the specific claim sentence 4 makes.

   Calling an objection unconvincing names a disagreement and takes none of the four routes out of one. A rebuttal has to say which part fails: the evidence, the inference, the scope, or the weight.

10. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

    (1) Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural on March 4, 1865, with the war all but won. (2) He grants that both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and then calls it strange that any men should ask a just God's aid in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces. (3) The rebuke is unmistakable. (4) One clause later he suspends his own right to deliver it.

    The writer wants to close the paragraph with a sentence that develops the tension sentences 3 and 4 create rather than dissolving it. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

    Throughout history, the greatest leaders have understood that forgiveness accomplishes more than blame ever could. The charge stays in force while the standing to press it is given up, and the war that follows is assigned to both North and South, so the victors are handed a verdict they are not permitted to enjoy. In the end Lincoln decides that charity matters more than judgment, and the tension in the passage disappears. The address runs to only about seven hundred words and was printed in newspapers across the country within days.

    “Throughout history” opens onto a generality the paragraph never earned, and it is the best-known of the phrases readers treat as a substitute for analysis rather than as complexity.

    Correct. It holds both halves in force (the accusation stands, the judge steps down), and then extends the tension by naming who is included in the offense, which is what the paragraph's own evidence has set up.

    Announcing that the tension disappears is the surest way to lose the point it was worth. Sophistication is credited for holding a contradiction open, not for tidying it into a moral in the final line.

    Length and circulation are facts about the speech, not developments of the paragraph's claim, and a closing sentence that changes the subject wastes the position in a paragraph that carries the most weight.

Lesson 8.1 · Unit 8 · CED skills 7.A and 8.A

Diction and connotation: the approximate word and the right one

Diction is word choice, and it is never only about meaning. A crowd and a mob name the same people; thrifty and cheap name the same habit. Denotation is what a word names; connotation is what it drags in behind, and connotation is where the analysis happens. Register (formal, colloquial, technical) does the same job at the scale of a whole passage.

Lesson 8.2 · Unit 8 · CED skills 7.A and 8.A

Figurative comparison: what a metaphor asks the reader to accept

A comparison is an argument in miniature. Call a nation a body and you have smuggled in claims (that it can sicken, that it has one will, that a diseased part might be cut off to save the rest), and the reader grants all three before noticing anything was proposed. That is why figurative language is on this exam: it moves claims past the place where readers argue.

Lesson 8.3 · Unit 8 · CED skills 7.A and 8.A

Syntax I: sentence length, parallelism, and antithesis

Syntax is the order and shape of words in a sentence, and it carries meaning the words alone do not. Three long sentences and then a four-word one: the short sentence sounds like a verdict, whatever it happens to say. Repeat a grammatical pattern down a list and the items begin to look like members of one family: a claim the writer never has to prove.

Lesson 8.4 · Unit 8 · CED skills 7.B and 8.B

Syntax II: what a clause demotes, and what position emphasizes

A clause has a subject and a verb. If it can stand alone it is independent; if a word like because, although, when or who hooks it to something else it is dependent. That distinction is a ranking system. Whatever sits in the main clause is what your sentence is about, and everything else has been demoted to explanation: however important it is.

Lesson 8.5 · Unit 8 · CED skills 7.A and 8.A

Tone and irony: attitude, and the gap that gives it away

Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject and toward you, and it is produced by everything in the last four lessons: the words, the comparisons, the shape of the sentences. That is why “the tone is serious” is never analysis: tone is the result somebody else already produced. Irony is what happens when a writer's stated position and actual position come apart and the reader is expected to notice.

Lesson 8.6 · Unit 8 · CED skills 7.C and 8.C

Punctuation and mechanics: the colon, the dash, the semicolon, the full stop

Punctuation is not housekeeping. A mark tells a reader how fast to go, what to expect next, and how two ideas are related, which makes every mark a small decision about emphasis. Skill 7.C asks you to explain how grammar and mechanics contribute to clarity and effect; the writing questions in Section I test the same thing by handing you a draft that is punctuated adequately and asking for better.

Unit 8 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 8 review: diction, syntax, tone, and punctuation

Six reading questions on one passage from Paine and four revision questions on short student drafts: name the choice a writer made before you look at the options, and read all four rationales once you have clicked, not only the one for your answer.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, number I, Philadelphia, December 1776.

   These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

   In the passage above, the phrases “summer soldier” and “sunshine patriot” primarily

   praise the volunteers who had filled the ranks during the warm campaigning months of 1776 suggest that the men who leave are simply inexperienced, and could be trained out of the fault define a man by the conditions he requires in order to serve, so that quitting reads as a fixed trait of the man rather than as a judgment about the war identify the particular regiments whose terms of enlistment were due to expire at the end of December

   The verb in the same sentence is “shrink,” and no praise ever arrives. Both words are drawn from fair weather, and fair-weather service is the thing Paine is naming; reading a connotation backward usually means the surrounding verb went unread.

   Nothing in either phrase points at skill: a summer soldier may have fought through three summers. The nouns name a condition a man attaches to his service, and a condition is not a gap in training that drilling could close.

   Correct. “Summer” and “sunshine” both bind a man to the weather he will turn out in, and a man defined by his weather is a kind of person, not the holder of a position. That is how Paine takes the argument away from the reader before it starts: a man who goes home in December is not deciding anything about the war, he is showing what he always was.

   Paine names no unit, no officer, and no date of discharge, and the phrases would lose all their force if he had. They work because any reader can be measured against them, which a roster of expiring enlistments could never do.

2. In the passage above, the comparison in “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered” primarily

   concedes the size of the task by measuring the enemy against something no reader expects to beat cheaply, so the difficulty becomes evidence of what is being fought rather than a reason to stop argues that the British ministry is a wicked institution whose officials deserve damnation implies that the struggle is hopeless, since hell by definition cannot be conquered at all borrows a familiar religious figure in order to flatter readers who attend church regularly

   Correct. The ground of the comparison is stated in the sentence itself, “not easily conquered”, so the likeness is about difficulty, not about evil. Paine is answering men who have found the war harder than they expected, and the figure tells them that the hardness is the measure of the opponent, which is a very different thing from a warning.

   Wickedness is not what the sentence compares. The clause names one shared property, the labor of conquering, and a simile only claims the likeness it states; supplying the associations you happen to have for the vehicle is the commonest way to overread one.

   “Not easily” is not “not at all,” and the very next clause offers a “consolation” that ends in triumph. A reading that makes the passage despair contradicts the sentence it sits inside.

   Even if the figure is familiar, an answer about the audience's churchgoing describes the readers rather than the argument. The comparison would work on an unbeliever, because what it borrows from hell is its reputation for costing everything.

3. In the passage above, the matched clauses “the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph” primarily

   concede that the war may be lost, and prepare the reader to accept that outcome list two separate advantages a reader may expect from continued service soften the previous sentence by allowing that some conflicts turn out to be easy set cost and reward in a fixed proportion, so that every increase in hardship counts as evidence for going on rather than against it

   Defeat is never contemplated. The clause pair assumes the triumph and asks only how glorious it will be, and the words before it, “we have this consolation”, are the grammar of reassurance, not of preparation for loss.

   These are not two benefits but the two terms of one ratio, tied together by the repeated “the … the …” construction. Reading a proportion as a list throws away the only claim the construction actually makes.

   Nothing here retracts anything. Both halves are comparatives on a single scale, and a scale that runs from hard to harder never says that any point on it is easy.

   Correct. Matched grammar asserts a matched relationship (as one term rises, so does the other), and the assertion is never defended, because the shape carries it. That is why a soldier reading this in a December camp cannot use his own suffering as an argument for going home: the sentence has already spent it on the other side.

4. In the passage above, Paine's decision to place the clause about the man who “stands it now” after “but,” at the end of the sentence, primarily

   subordinates that man's service to the desertion described in the first half of the sentence gives the sentence's emphatic final position to the reward rather than to the defection, so a reader is left holding an offer instead of an accusation signals that the two groups are in fact the same men described at different moments withholds the main clause until the close, making the sentence periodic

   “But” is a coordinating conjunction, and coordination ranks clauses as equals; nothing in the sentence is demoted. Subordination would have required “although” or “while,” and Paine used neither.

   Correct. English puts its weight at the end of a sentence, and the last words here are “the love and thanks of man and woman.” A reader who began the sentence hearing about quitters finishes it hearing what he himself could be owed, and the order is what makes the second half feel like the point.

   The sentence holds the two apart: those who “shrink” and “he that stands it now” are the two sides of the contrast “but” announces. Collapsing them into one group empties the distinction the whole sentence is built on.

   A periodic sentence delays its main clause to the end; this one delivers a main clause immediately, the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink, and then adds a second. Naming a device the sentence does not use is a quick way to lose a syntax item.

5. Which of the following best describes the tone of the passage?

   Detached and analytical, weighing the arguments on either side before arriving at a verdict Bitter and accusatory, holding the reader responsible for the condition the army is in Bracing and unsparing: it refuses to make the task sound smaller than it is, and treats the difficulty itself as the reason to stay Playful and ironic, saying something close to the opposite of what it means in order to shame the reader

   Nothing is weighed here. Every sentence takes a side, and several of them judge men's characters; an analyst setting out both positions does not call anybody a sunshine patriot.

   There is blame in the passage, but it falls on the men who are leaving, and the sentence turns at “but” to what the man who stays deserves. A tone word has to fit the whole passage, not one clause pulled out of it.

   Correct. Paine concedes hardship in every sentence (the times try men, tyranny is not easily conquered, the conflict is hard), and never once comforts anyone by shrinking the task. Naming the tone precisely means naming both halves at once: unsparing about the cost, steady about the claim.

   The passage means exactly what it says, and irony requires a gap between a stated position and an actual one. The nearest thing to a joke, “summer soldier,” is a straight insult rather than a wink.

6. In the passage above, the colon in the final sentence primarily serves to

   present what follows as the explanation the first clause has just earned, so that the observation about cheapness arrives as a principle rather than as a second opinion mark a pause of roughly the length a comma would give, making the sentence easier to read aloud introduce a list of the things Paine believes are worth what they cost signal a reversal, warning the reader that what follows contradicts what came before

   Correct. A colon promises delivery: the clause in front of it reports what people do, esteem too lightly what they obtained too cheap, and the clause behind it supplies the rule that accounts for it. A semicolon would have set the two side by side and left the reader to make the connection; the colon says the connection is already made.

   A comma and a colon do different jobs, and this colon joins two statements that could each stand as a sentence. Treating punctuation as pacing alone is exactly the habit the exam's mechanics questions are built to catch.

   Nothing is listed. Colons often introduce lists, but what follows this one is a full independent clause with its own subject and verb: “it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

   Reversal is the work of “but” and “yet,” both of which Paine uses earlier in the passage. The two clauses joined by the colon agree with each other; the second says why the first is true.

7. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Ida B. Wells.

   (1) In “Lynch Law in America,” published in January 1900, Ida B. Wells takes the word her Northern readers were using and refuses it. (2) In the reform press a mob was a thing that boiled over, and an outburst has no author. (3) Wells answers with “cool, calculating deliberation,” a phrase carried over from the vocabulary of business and planning. (4) The change of vocabulary affects the killings. (5) What had been a spasm becomes a policy, and a policy has people who decided on it.

   The writer wants sentence 4 to name precisely what the change of vocabulary does, in terms sentence 5 can then develop. Which version of sentence 4 best accomplishes this goal?

   The change of vocabulary affects the killings. The change of vocabulary reclassifies the killings, filing them with acts that are decided on rather than with accidents that happen. The change of vocabulary makes the killings sound far worse than they had sounded before. The change of vocabulary shows Wells's remarkable command of the English language.

   “Affects” names no direction and no result; it is the verb a writer reaches for when the analysis has not been done yet. Since sentence 5 goes on to describe a specific change of category, sentence 4 should say which change is coming.

   Correct. “Reclassifies” states the operation, and “decided on rather than … happen” hands sentence 5 the two categories it needs, spasm and policy. Choosing the exact verb is the shortest route to commentary that explains how a choice works instead of reporting that a choice was made.

   Intensity is not the claim. Wells's phrase is colder than the word it replaces, not more lurid, and the paragraph is about what kind of act a lynching is, not about how bad it sounds.

   Praise for a writer's skill is not analysis of the writing, and this sentence could be attached to any author on any page, which is a reliable sign that it explains nothing about this one.

8. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about the Declaration of Independence.

   (1) The charges against the king run to twenty-seven counts, and not one of them is argued. (2) One count says he refused his assent to wholesome laws. (3) Another says he dissolved representative houses. (4) A third says he plundered the colonists' seas. (5) Taken one at a time any of these could be answered, but set in a column they stop reading as complaints and start reading as a record.

   The writer wants to combine sentences 2, 3, and 4 so that the repeated grammatical pattern does the work sentence 5 describes. Which of the following versions best accomplishes this goal?

   One count says he refused his assent to wholesome laws, another says he dissolved representative houses, and a third, the gravest of them, says he plundered the colonists' seas. The counts concern wholesome laws, representative houses, and the colonists' seas. Although he refused his assent to wholesome laws and dissolved representative houses, he also plundered the colonists' seas. He refused his assent to wholesome laws; he dissolved representative houses; he plundered the colonists' seas.

   Keeping “One count says … another says … a third says” leaves the student's counting in front of the king's acting, so the reader hears a list being tallied rather than a man behaving. The inserted aside then breaks the pattern at precisely the moment sentence 5 says the pattern should be building.

   Compressing three clauses into three nouns deletes the verbs, and with them the actor. Sentence 5 depends on a reader meeting the same man doing the same kind of thing three times over, which a list of topics cannot deliver.

   “Although” ranks the items, demoting two of the three, and promises a contrast that the three counts do not contain. Subordination is the wrong tool when the claim is that the counts belong together as equals.

   Correct. Three clauses of identical shape, each opening on the same subject, are what make separate grievances look like one habit: the effect sentence 5 names. The semicolons hold them inside one sentence, so the column is visible at a glance instead of being spread over three full stops.

9. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Emerson's Nature.

   (1) In the first chapter of Nature, published in 1836, Emerson moves from a simile to a metaphor within a few lines. (2) A man casts off his years “as the snake his slough,” and the two things stay held apart. (3) Although the comparison costs the reader nothing, he is only asked to admire a likeness. (4) By the time “I become a transparent eye-ball” arrives, that reader has already taken the cheaper version. (5) The order of the two figures is the persuasion.

   The writer wants sentence 3 to put the idea sentences 4 and 5 depend on, that the first comparison is cheap, in the sentence's independent clause. Which version of sentence 3 best accomplishes this goal?

   Although the comparison costs the reader nothing, he is only asked to admire a likeness. Because the reader is only asked to admire a likeness, the comparison costs him nothing. The reader is only asked to admire a likeness, although the comparison costs him nothing. The comparison costs the reader nothing, and the reader is only asked to admire a likeness.

   This is the draft as it stands, and it buries the point: the cheapness sits in an “although” clause, the slot a writer uses for material the reader is invited to set aside. Sentences 4 and 5 then lean on something the paragraph never quite asserted.

   Correct. The reason goes into the dependent clause and the claim into the independent one, so “costs him nothing” is both the assertion and the last thing in the sentence. “Because” also names the actual relationship between the halves, which “although” had backwards.

   Swapping the clauses keeps the wrong idea in the main slot and keeps “although,” which still promises a contrast these two statements do not have. A likeness admired at no cost is one situation, not two opposed ones.

   Coordination makes the two statements equal in rank and says nothing about how they are related. The paragraph needs one of them to explain the other, and “and” is precisely the connective that declines to choose.

10. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about G. K. Chesterton's “A Piece of Chalk.”

    (1) A weekly column has no room for the transitions a long essay can afford. (2) Chesterton's marks carry the structure instead. (3) “She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper.” (4) Three steps arrive in one breath, and no word ranks them. (5) A reader accepts the chain because nothing about it was ever asserted.

    The writer wants the punctuation between sentences 1 and 2 to show that sentence 2 states what follows from sentence 1, without adding a connective word. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

    A weekly column has no room for the transitions a long essay can afford, Chesterton's marks carry the structure instead. A weekly column has no room for the transitions a long essay can afford; Chesterton's marks carry the structure instead. A weekly column has no room for the transitions a long essay can afford: Chesterton's marks carry the structure instead. A weekly column has no room for the transitions a long essay can afford: Chesterton's marks carry the structure instead.

    Two independent clauses joined by a comma make a comma splice, and a revision that introduces an error cannot be the answer however well it reads. The mark also says nothing at all about how the clauses are related, which is what the goal asks for.

    A semicolon balances two clauses as one thought and deliberately declines to say which one produces the other. That is the right mark when a writer wants both held at once; here the stated goal is to show the second clause following from the first.

    Correct. A colon announces that what comes after it delivers what the clause before it promised, so the second clause reads as the consequence of the first: no room for transitions, therefore marks doing the joining. And it accomplishes that without a connective word, which is the condition the goal sets.

    A dash interrupts. A single dash swerves into an aside or an afterthought, which gives the second clause the sound of something tacked on rather than something that follows, and the informality is out of key with the sentences around it.

Lesson 9.1 · Unit 9 · CED skills 1.A, 3.A, 5.A, 7.A

The reading questions: six asks, however they are worded

Twenty-three to twenty-five of the forty-five questions hang on nonfiction passages, and they look more varied than they are. Strip the wording away and the same six asks come back. The work is recognition: decide which one you have, say what the answer must contain, and only then look down. Options are written to be attractive; the stem is written to be exact.

Lesson 9.2 · Unit 9 · CED skills 4.A, 6.A, 6.B, 8.B

The writing questions: answer the stated goal, not your taste

The other twenty to twenty-two questions in Section I hand you a student draft with numbered sentences and ask you to revise it, and they tell you what revising means. Every stem states a goal, and that goal is the answer key: three of the four options are usually better writing than the original, and only one does the stated job.

Lesson 9.3 · Unit 9 · CED skills 1.A, 5.A, 6.A, 7.A

Rhetorical analysis in forty minutes: spend the first eight well

Most of what goes wrong in a rhetorical analysis essay goes wrong before the writing starts. Students read once, begin, find their real idea in the third paragraph, and never go back to fix the thesis. Budget the time instead: five minutes reading and marking, three planning, thirty writing, two checking. The thirty are only as good as the eight in front of them.

Lesson 9.4 · Unit 9 · CED skills 4.A and 6.A

Six sources, fifteen minutes: take the position first

There is one common way to lose this essay: spend the reading period understanding all six sources, then write a tour (Source A says this, Source B says that) with no argument for the sources to serve. Reverse the order. Take a position from the prompt alone in the first three minutes; after that the sources have jobs, and most of them are not needed.

Lesson 9.5 · Unit 9 · CED skills 4.B, 4.C, 6.A

The argument essay: find the question inside the idea

The argument prompt hands you an idea, usually a sentence or two from somebody worth arguing with, and asks for your position. The mistake is treating the idea as a topic. A topic invites you to write everything you know; a prompt contains a question, and the question is always narrower than the idea. Find it, take a qualified position, and get three pieces of evidence on the page before you write a sentence of the essay.

Unit 9 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 9 review: Section I in miniature

Five reading questions on one passage from Lincoln and five revision questions on two student drafts: take it the way you will take the real thing, about thirteen minutes and no stopping, then go back and read all four rationales on every item rather than only the one for the answer you chose.

Multiple choice

1. Source: Abraham Lincoln, address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863.

   But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

   Which of the following best describes the rhetorical situation of the passage?

   A commanding general addressing troops on the eve of a battle, urging them to hold the ground they have been given A historian writing long after the war, weighing what the battle finally accomplished A president at a burial-ground dedication, speaking to mourners who came to watch the dead be honored and who are handed a task instead A commander's official report to Congress, accounting for the losses of a campaign

   The battle is months past and the men being spoken of are already buried: the passage says “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” looking back at a field rather than forward to one. Dating a text by its subject instead of by its headnote is the most common rhetorical-situation error.

   The place is “here” and the speaker is inside the ceremony he is describing, which is why he has to explain what the ceremony cannot do. A later assessment would have no rite to refuse and no audience standing in front of it.

   Correct. The headnote gives a cemetery dedication in November 1863, and a crowd at such a ceremony expects the dead to be honored by the occasion. Lincoln tells them the honoring was finished by the men in the ground, which is why the passage ends by assigning work rather than offering consolation.

   Nothing is counted and no campaign is explained; the passage weighs words against deeds instead of reporting either. An official accounting would also not address its readers as “us the living.”

2. In the passage above, which of the following best states Lincoln's claim?

   The dedication that matters cannot be performed by the ceremony, so it falls to the living, who must commit themselves to the work the dead left unfinished The ground at Gettysburg is already sacred, and therefore the ceremony being held on it is unnecessary What is said at a memorial will outlast what is done on the field the memorial commemorates The soldiers buried at Gettysburg deserve a grander monument than the nation has so far provided

   Correct. The first sentence denies the ceremony's power, the second names who has already exercised it, and the last draws the consequence: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated.” The claim is the transfer of a duty, not the praise of the dead.

   The passage does say the ground is consecrated already, but stopping there drops the sentence the whole paragraph is built to reach. Any statement of the claim has to account for “rather,” the word that turns a denial into an assignment.

   This reverses the passage exactly: the world “will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” but “can never forget what they did here.” When a ranking arrives inside a single sentence, it is easy to read it backwards.

   Monuments and their adequacy never come up. Lincoln's objection is that no ceremony of any size could do this work, which is a stronger and different complaint from saying that this one was done too cheaply.

3. In the passage above, the three refusals, “we can not dedicate,” “we can not consecrate,” “we can not hallow”, primarily serve to

   admit that the speaker is unequal to the occasion and therefore means to keep his remarks short concede that the ceremony has come too soon after the battle for anyone to judge what it meant distinguish three religious rites so that listeners will know which one the day properly calls for empty the ceremony of the very powers it was assembled to exercise, so that the duty it cannot discharge has to be handed to someone else

   Humility is the surface of the move, not its work. A speaker who genuinely thought himself unequal to the occasion would not go on to assign his audience a task, and the passage grows more demanding after the refusals, not less.

   Timing appears nowhere in the passage, and the reason given for the refusal is the soldiers' own act, not the calendar. Supplying a reason the text never offers is the quickest way to lose a function item.

   The three verbs are not being sorted; they are being denied one after another, and their near-identity is the point. Naming a device correctly and then assigning it a job the passage never performs is the standard trap on this question type.

   Correct. Dedicating, consecrating, and hallowing are exactly what a dedication ceremony exists to do, so refusing all three at once leaves the occasion with nothing to perform. Once the rite is powerless, the duty must go somewhere, and the last sentence is waiting to receive it.

4. In the passage above, which of the following best describes the line of reasoning?

   A principle is stated, three examples illustrate it, and a prediction closes the passage A ceremonial power is denied, the denial is justified by naming who has already exercised that power, the speaker's own words are ranked below the soldiers' deeds, and the consequence, a task for the living, is drawn last The battle is narrated, a moral is drawn from how it ended, and the moral is applied to the listeners A question is raised, two answers are weighed against each other, and the stronger of them is adopted

   No principle opens the passage and nothing is illustrated by examples; the movement is denial, reason, ranking, consequence. Naming the job of each sentence before you read the options keeps a familiar essay shape from being imposed on a passage that lacks it.

   Correct. Sentence by sentence: the refusal, the reason (“have consecrated it”), the ranking of what is said below what was done, and then “rather,” which draws the consequence. The order is doing real work, because the audience has to believe the ceremony is powerless before it will accept a task in place of one.

   Nothing is narrated. The struggle is referred to twice and recounted neither time, and no event follows another in sequence: narration is a method of development this passage deliberately avoids.

   Only one possibility is ever entertained, and it is rejected in the first sentence. Nothing is weighed against anything else, which is part of why the closing assignment sounds inevitable rather than chosen.

5. In the passage above, the contrast between what the world “will little note, nor long remember” and what “it can never forget” primarily

   subordinates speech to action, so that after the rite has been refused the ceremony's words are discounted too, and nothing is left that can honor the dead except what the living go on to do makes a prediction about the address that history has since proved wrong flatters the audience by implying that their presence will be remembered longer than the speech concedes that the soldiers' deeds have already been recorded more fully somewhere else

   Correct. Having refused to consecrate the ground, Lincoln next discounts the ceremony's words, his own included. With the rite set aside and the speech set aside, the only instrument of honor remaining is the conduct of the living, which is precisely the sentence that follows.

   The prediction is famously wrong, and its wrongness is beside the point: the question asks what the contrast does inside the argument. A true observation about a text's afterlife is not an answer about its effect.

   Nobody is flattered here. The audience's attendance is never mentioned, and the sentence lowers the standing of everything said at the ceremony rather than raising the standing of anyone at it.

   No other record of the soldiers' deeds is mentioned or implied. The contrast sets saying against doing, not one account of the doing against another.

6. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition address.

   (1) On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington spoke at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. (2) Washington says something about what Black Southerners should do. (3) He first tells a parable: a ship in distress signals a passing vessel for water and is answered with the advice to cast down its bucket where it is, into a river mouth it had taken for the open sea. (4) Similarly, he turns that same advice on the white employers in the hall and asks them to cast down their bucket among the neighbors they already have. (5) The words do not change; only the listener does. (6) An audience that had just approved the advice for somebody else was in no position to refuse it.

   The writer wants sentence 2 to state a defensible claim that sentences 3 through 6 support. Which version of sentence 2 best accomplishes this goal?

   Washington had founded Tuskegee Institute fourteen years earlier and was by 1895 the best-known Black educator in the country. Washington devotes a good deal of the address to the question of what Black Southerners should do. The audience in Atlanta answered the address with loud and sustained applause. Washington builds the address on a parable he can aim twice, so that white listeners who have just approved the advice for others must either take it themselves or admit it was never good advice.

   The biography is accurate and would serve a different paragraph, but it is not a claim about how the address works, and sentences 3 through 6 never mention Tuskegee. A topic sentence has to be provable by the paragraph it opens.

   This announces a subject instead of asserting anything, and nobody could disagree with it. A sentence no one can dispute leaves the rest of the paragraph with nothing to prove.

   The reception is a fact about the listeners, not about the design of the speech, and the draft never returns to it. Asking whether the following sentences bear on a candidate topic sentence is the fastest test available.

   Correct. It is arguable, it names the specific choice the paragraph goes on to trace, one parable used twice, and sentences 3 through 6 are exactly the proof it needs. A claim a paragraph can prove is one written to fit the evidence already on the page.

7. In the draft above, the writer wants to add a sentence after sentence 5 that supports the claim in sentence 5 with specific evidence from the address. Which of the following best accomplishes this goal?

   The parable has been reprinted in American anthologies and schoolbooks ever since. “Cast down your bucket where you are” arrives twice in the same words, first to the Black Southerners Washington addresses directly and then to the white employers seated in front of him, with only the neighbors named changing. The Exposition was staged to advertise Southern industry to Northern investors and drew visitors from across the country. The repetition in the address is striking, and no listener in that hall could possibly have missed it.

   Later reprinting is a fact about the speech's afterlife, while sentence 5 claims something about the speech itself. Evidence has to come from the text the claim is about.

   Correct. Sentence 5 claims that the wording holds while the addressee changes, and this supplies the repeated sentence and the two audiences it is aimed at. Evidence for a claim about repetition has to show the repetition.

   The context is accurate and would open a different paragraph well, but the purpose of the Exposition says nothing about how the address is worded. Relevant subject matter is not the same thing as relevant evidence.

   This restates sentence 5 and then calls it obvious. A revision that adds emphasis instead of facts never satisfies an add-evidence goal, however true the emphasis is.

8. In the draft above, the writer wants the opening of sentence 4 to name the relationship the sentences actually have. Which version of the opening of sentence 4 best accomplishes this goal?

   For example, he turns that same advice on the white employers in the hall… Nevertheless, he turns that same advice on the white employers in the hall… Having won assent to the parable, he turns that same advice on the white employers in the hall… In other words, he turns that same advice on the white employers in the hall…

   “For example” promises that what follows is an instance of what came before, but the second application is not an example of the parable: it is a second use of it, on a different audience. A connective that promises the wrong relationship reads to a grader as broken reasoning rather than as style.

   “Nevertheless” promises a reversal, and nothing reverses: the advice is identical, which is the fact sentences 5 and 6 depend on. Connectives pointing the wrong direction are the most common error in this question type.

   Correct. The second application works only because the first was accepted, so the relationship is dependence, and naming it is what lets sentence 6's conclusion follow. The draft's “Similarly” records only that the two moves resemble each other and hides the fact that one enables the other.

   “In other words” announces a restatement, but sentence 4 does not say sentence 3 over again: it changes who is being spoken to, and that change of addressee is the whole argument.

9. The following is a draft of a paragraph from a student's essay about Jacob Riis.

   (1) Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, after more than a decade of police reporting in New York's tenement districts. (2) The book counts. (3) It measures. (4) It gives the rent charged for a room and the cubic feet of air allowed a sleeper, and then it stops counting and asks the reader to come up the stairs. (5) Riis later lectured with a stereopticon and became a friend of Theodore Roosevelt. (6) The arithmetic is what earns the invitation, since a reader who has accepted the figures cannot easily refuse what the figures were measuring.

   The writer wants to combine sentences 2 and 3 so that the pair reads as a single move and the turn in sentence 4 gains force. Which of the following versions best accomplishes this goal?

   Before it asks the reader to feel anything, the book counts and measures. The book counts, and it measures. Although the book counts, it measures. The book, which counts, measures.

   Correct. Naming what the counting comes before makes the two verbs one move and sets the expectation that sentence 4 then breaks, at the moment the book stops counting. Emphasis comes from the order a combination imposes, not from the joining itself.

   Joining the clauses with “and” is a combination in grammar only: the same two facts arrive in the same order carrying the same weight, and the turn in sentence 4 lands exactly as it did before.

   “Although” invents a contrast between two statements that agree. Counting and measuring are the same activity in this paragraph, so subordinating one to the other misdescribes the reasoning.

   A relative clause pushes the counting into the background just when the paragraph needs both verbs at full strength. Coordination equalizes and subordination ranks, and here the two ideas belong on the same level.

10. In the second draft above, the writer is considering deleting sentence 5. Should the writer make this change?

    Yes, because the sentence is inaccurate, since Riis never lectured publicly and did not know Roosevelt. Yes, because the paragraph's claim is about how the book moves from measurement to invitation, and Riis's later lecturing and friendships do nothing to advance that claim. No, because the sentence shows how influential Riis became and so strengthens the paragraph's argument. No, because a paragraph about Riis is incomplete without an account of what he did after the book appeared.

    The detail is accurate (Riis lectured for years with lantern slides, and Roosevelt became a friend and ally), so this deletes for a reason that does not exist. Deletion questions turn on relevance to the claim, not on truth.

    Correct. Sentences 2, 3, 4, and 6 trace one continuous movement from figures to invitation, and sentence 5 steps outside the book entirely, breaking the chain between 4 and 6. Unity asks whether a sentence extends the paragraph's one claim, however interesting it is on its own.

    Influence would matter if the paragraph were arguing that Riis was believed. It is arguing about the order of moves inside one book, and a later friendship makes that account no more likely.

    Completeness of a career is not a standard the paragraph set for itself; the standard it set is in sentence 6. Adding biography to satisfy a rule the draft never adopted is how paragraphs lose unity.

Synthesis 1 · 55 minutes (15 reading + 40 writing)

Communities across the United States support public libraries with local tax money, even as more of what a library once supplied has moved online. In an essay that synthesizes at least three of the six sources for support, argue a position on the role a publicly funded library should play in its community.

Synthesis 2 · 55 minutes (15 reading + 40 writing)

The law that created the National Park Service in 1916 directs it both to conserve the parks unimpaired and to provide for their enjoyment. In an essay that synthesizes at least three of the six sources for support, argue a position on how public land should be managed when preservation and use come into conflict.

Synthesis 3 · 55 minutes (15 reading + 40 writing)

Schools and colleges are pressed to prepare students for particular kinds of work, and students are pressed to choose a course of study that pays. In an essay that synthesizes at least three of the six sources for support, argue a position on how much of a secondary or college education should be broad study rather than training for a job.

Synthesis 4 · 55 minutes (15 reading + 40 writing)

Communities put up monuments in the places they share, and every monument tells one story about the past rather than another. In an essay that synthesizes at least three of the six sources for support, argue a position on how a community should decide what to commemorate.

Synthesis 5 · 55 minutes (15 reading + 40 writing)

The United States has adopted, repealed, and readopted the practice of moving the clocks forward in summer. Carefully read the six sources below, including the introductory material for each. Then write an essay that synthesizes material from at least three of the sources and argues your position on whether the United States should keep changing its clocks twice a year.

Rhetorical analysis 1 · 40 minutes

On March 4, 1865, with the Confederacy weeks from collapse and more than six hundred thousand Americans dead, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office a second time. The crowd at the Capitol had come to hear a victory speech from a president whose armies were winning. He spoke for about seven hundred words. Read the excerpts and the summary below carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Lincoln makes to prepare a victorious audience for the end of the war.

Rhetorical analysis 2 · 40 minutes

In 1852 the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society invited Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery fourteen years earlier, to deliver the city's Independence Day address. He spoke on July 5 at Corinthian Hall to a large audience of white reformers who had come expecting a celebration of the nation's founding. Read the passage carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Douglass makes to convey his message to his audience.

Rhetorical analysis 3 · 40 minutes

On January 18, 1892, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: seventy-six years old and forty-four years past the Seneca Falls convention she had helped call: read "The Solitude of Self" to the House Committee on the Judiciary, a room of congressmen who alone could send a suffrage amendment to the floor and who had been receiving, and shelving, such petitions for decades. Read the summary and the excerpts carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Stanton makes to convey her message to her audience.

Rhetorical analysis 4 · 40 minutes

Woodrow Wilson had won re-election in 1916 on his record of keeping the United States out of the European war. On April 2, 1917, after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, he came before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against a country most Americans had no wish to fight. Read the excerpts and the summary below carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Wilson makes to move a reluctant Congress and country to war.

Rhetorical analysis 5 · 40 minutes

A year after leaving the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, addressing the university's faculty and students: an audience whose work is the study and criticism of what other people do: on the duties of citizens in a republic. Read the passage carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Roosevelt makes to convey his message about who deserves a republic's credit.

Argument 1 · 40 minutes

In “Self-Reliance” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Write an essay that argues your position on the extent to which a person's integrity depends on refusing to conform.

Argument 2 · 40 minutes

In “Corn-Pone Opinions” (written 1901, published 1923), Mark Twain argued that most of what people call their own views are borrowed, without examination, from the people around them: “It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist.” Write an essay that argues your position on the extent to which independent opinion is possible.

Argument 3 · 40 minutes

Benjamin Franklin's “The Way to Wealth” (1758) collects proverbs holding that lost time is never found again and that idleness is the costliest expense. Write an essay that argues your position on the value of time that is not spent productively.

Argument 4 · 40 minutes

Speaking at Canandaigua, New York, in 1857, Frederick Douglass said that power concedes nothing without a demand: it never did and it never will. Write an essay that argues your position on whether meaningful change requires confrontation.

Argument 5 · 40 minutes

In “The Fallacy of Success” (1908), G. K. Chesterton argued that writing about success teaches nothing, because success is not a subject but a result. Write an essay that argues your position on how a society should define success.

Unit recap

Unit recap

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