Reading and Literature
Core concepts
Literary items cluster around a few recurring ideas: genre and form (how a poem's line breaks, a story's structure, or a drama's stage directions shape meaning), narrative technique (point of view, narrator reliability, direct versus indirect characterization), and figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification, symbol, hyperbole, allusion). You also need to read nonfiction rhetorically - identifying main idea, text structure (comparison, cause–effect, problem–solution, chronology), author's purpose, and whether evidence actually supports the claim.
Traps
The most common errors are near-misses in terminology. Topic is what a text is about; theme is a statement about human experience the whole text develops - "loneliness" is a topic, while "isolation can distort memory" is a theme. Tone is the speaker's or author's attitude; mood is the feeling created in the reader. Irony gets flattened: verbal irony says the opposite of what is meant, situational irony reverses expectation, dramatic irony gives the audience knowledge a character lacks. Another trap is trusting a first-person narrator as neutral - an "I" who admits to exaggerating is unreliable, and the question usually hinges on one revealing detail. Finally, beware answers that are true about the passage but do not address what was asked.
Rule of thumb
Answer in two steps: locate the lines the question points to, then choose the option supported by those words rather than by your general knowledge of the work.
Worked example: A line reads "The moon was a ghostly galleon." Asked to name the device, note the direct comparison with no like or as - metaphor, not simile; "ghostly" also carries connotation that shapes the tone.