Craft, Structure, and Language Skills
What this domain tests
Craft, Structure, and Language Skills asks how an author's choices shape meaning. Questions cover word meaning in context, figurative language, tone, point of view, text structure, and author's purpose. You are often asked why a word or sentence is used, not just what it means.
Rules that decide answers
- Context clues come from definition, contrast, example, and cause-effect relationships in nearby sentences. Substitute your candidate word back into the sentence to test it.
- Tone is the author's attitude toward the subject; mood is the feeling created in the reader. A passage can have a critical tone without being angry.
- Point of view controls what information is available. A first-person narrator reports only what that narrator knows; a third-person limited narrator follows one character's perspective.
- Text structure may be chronological, compare-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution, or description. One signal word is not enough; check the overall pattern.
- Purpose is the author's goal, such as to inform, explain, persuade, or entertain. Purpose is inferred from content, audience, and tone together.
- Figurative language should be interpreted for its effect, not just labeled. A metaphor can create praise, criticism, or irony.
Worked example
A sentence calls a committee's plan a patchwork quilt of borrowed proposals, stitched together the night before the deadline. The question asks what the metaphor mainly suggests. The best answer is that the plan was hastily assembled from other people's ideas. Patchwork implies pieces from different sources; borrowed means not original; stitched the night before signals haste. An answer calling the plan colorful and creative misreads the metaphor literally and ignores the negative implication.
Traps
- Reading figurative language literally.
- Confusing tone with mood.
- Choosing a structure from a single transition word.
- Missing a shift in tone or perspective.
- Naming a device without explaining its effect.