Text Structure, Organization, and Rhetorical Devices
Structure questions ask how a passage is built and what a particular paragraph, sentence, or quotation is doing. Function questions - "the third paragraph serves mainly to..." - require you to describe a job, not a topic.
Common organizational patterns
- Chronological or narrative sequence
- Cause and effect
- Comparison and contrast
- Problem and solution
- Description or classification
- Claim, evidence, counterargument, rebuttal
- Question and answer, or order of importance
Transition words are the blueprint: "however" and "in contrast" announce a turn, "therefore" and "as a result" mark conclusions, "for example" signals illustration, "more importantly" signals escalation.
Devices to recognize
Metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, rhetorical question, repetition, parallelism, allusion, irony, analogy, anecdote, imagery, and alliteration. On the ISEE these appear mostly in literary and rhetorical passages, and the question asks about effect: what does the comparison help the author accomplish?
Worked example
A passage on school start times opens with evidence that adolescents need later starts, then presents the bus-schedule objection, then answers it by describing a district that rerouted buses at no extra cost. "The third paragraph serves mainly to" - correct answer: rebut a practical objection to the author's proposal. Wrong answer: describe how one district runs its buses. That states the content rather than the function.
Traps that cost marks
- Summarizing what a paragraph says instead of what it does.
- Naming a device that is not actually present.
- Treating a rhetorical question as a genuine request for information.
- Missing a shift marked by a single conjunction.