Craft and Structure: Vocabulary, Purpose, and Text Organization
What this domain tests
Craft and Structure questions ask about word meaning in context, author's purpose and tone, and how the passage is organized (structure). These questions reward attention to how something is said, not only what is said.
Concepts to master
- Contextual meaning: a word's meaning is fixed by surrounding sentences. Cover the word, predict a substitute, then check the choices.
- Connotation: words carry emotional shading. Insisted and claimed describe the same action with different attitudes; tone questions hinge on such shading.
- Author's purpose: why this sentence or paragraph exists - to illustrate, to contrast, to qualify, to concede a point, to introduce a counterargument.
- Structural patterns: comparison/contrast, cause/effect, chronological narrative, problem/solution, and claim-then-evidence. Transition words are your map.
- Function of a detail: a paragraph may exist to set up a later reversal rather than to state the main point.
Traps to watch
- The familiar-meaning trap: choosing a common dictionary meaning the word does not carry in this sentence.
- Tone overreach: extreme words (outraged, contemptuous) when the passage is merely skeptical or amused.
- Purpose confusion: mistaking what the author does (describes, contrasts) for what the author feels (tone) or claims (main idea).
- Misread transitions: treating a contrast signal (however, yet) as a continuation.
Rule of thumb
For vocabulary, substitute each choice into the sentence and reread; only one will preserve the sentence's logic. For purpose, ask "Why did the author put this sentence here?" - the answer usually concerns its relationship to the sentence before it.
Worked example
A writer says a scientist's early results were "modest." Choices include humble, small, unassuming, and shy. In context - describing limited data - small in scale fits the logic, while the human traits (humble, shy) misread the word's application to results.