Informational Text and Rhetoric
What this domain tests
Informational Text and Rhetoric focuses on nonfiction: exposition, argument, and persuasion. You must identify claims, evidence, warrants, and reasoning; analyze rhetorical appeals and audience; evaluate bias and source credibility; and recognize common fallacies. Expect questions about central idea, summary, text structure, tone, and comparing accounts of the same topic.
Core rules
- A claim is debatable; evidence supports it; a warrant is the often-unstated assumption connecting evidence to claim.
- Ethos concerns credibility and character; pathos concerns emotion and values; logos concerns reasoning and evidence.
- Correlation is not causation; anecdote is not representative data.
- A credible source is relevant, current, and methodologically sound, not merely famous.
- Bias can appear in word choice, selection of evidence, omission, and framing.
- A strong summary states the central claim and main supports without importing the writer’s opinion.
Worked example
An op-ed argues: ‘Plastic bags must be banned because one cleanup removed 4,000 bags from a single beach.’ Claim: bags should be banned. Evidence: one cleanup’s count. Warrant: beach cleanup data show that bans will reduce harm. The reasoning is weak because one beach and one cleanup are an anecdotal, nonrepresentative sample; the passage also assumes a ban will produce the claimed result. A better response would ask for broader data and evidence about ban outcomes.
Traps that cost marks
Calling a claim ‘evidence’ because it appears in the text; accepting a statistic without asking who produced it; confusing an emotional example with proof; missing qualifiers; and ignoring a counterargument that the passage acknowledges and answers.