Reading: Informational Text and Rhetoric
Core concepts
Informational passages require central idea, supporting details, and text structure: description, chronological sequence, cause–effect, compare–contrast, and problem–solution. For rhetoric, identify the speaker’s purpose and audience, the claim, the evidence (facts, statistics, examples, testimony, anecdote), and the reasoning that links them. Know the classical appeals: ethos (credibility and character), pathos (emotion and values), and logos (logic and evidence). Recognize stylistic devices-parallelism, anaphora, antithesis, rhetorical question, repetition, concession, and refutation-and common fallacies: ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma, slippery slope, post hoc, hasty generalization, and circular reasoning.
Traps
Test writers exploit blurred categories. An emotional anecdote can serve logos if it functions as evidence, so label an appeal by its function, not its feeling. A claim is what the author wants accepted; evidence supports it; a warrant is the unstated assumption connecting them-items often ask you to supply that assumption. “To inform” is usually too vague for purpose; prefer a specific purpose tied to audience. Watch for correlation presented as causation and for sources cited by name without relevant expertise.
Rule of thumb
For any argument item, label three things in the margin: claim, evidence, assumption. The correct answer usually concerns whichever label the question leaves out.
Worked example
“City council should fund the bike lanes” (claim). “After installation in three comparable cities, cycling injuries fell 30 percent” (evidence). “What happened in those cities will happen here” (unstated warrant). An item asking what the author assumes is answered by the warrant, not by restating the statistic.