497 core topics + 257 prerequisite topics taught as needed · approximately 265 hours of instruction including spaced review
An adaptive diagnostic (up to 40 questions) places the student on the course's knowledge graph - topics already known are credited, and instruction begins exactly at the learning frontier. Every topic is taught with a worked-example lesson and auto-graded practice; a topic is mastered at 75%+ and then maintained through spaced reviews on an expanding schedule. Mixed checks follow every 6 lessons; each unit ends with a 12-item quiz, and course-wide assessments appear at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% mastery. Prerequisite gaps below the course are detected and taught rather than skipped, so completion certifies the whole tower, not just the top.
| Say It Straight First [H] | Restate a difficult passage accurately before you interpret it. |
| The Weight of One Word [H] | Ask why the writer chose this word and not the nearest alternative. |
| What the Sentence Shape Does [H] | Read the structure of a sentence as part of what it means. |
| The Image That Carries It [H] | Read a concrete detail or comparison for the abstract work it is doing. |
| Where the Tone Turns [H] | Name a text's attitude toward its subject, and find where it changes. |
| What the Text Will Not Say [H] | Draw a conclusion the words on the page require but never state. |
| The Line That Actually Proves It [H] | Choose the quotation that supports your claim, not the one nearest it. |
| Reading With a Pencil [H] | Mark a text so the second pass starts where the first one ended. |
| Where the Reading Stops [H] | Tell a reading the text supports from one you have supplied yourself. |
| What a Character Does Instead of Saying [H] | Read a character from conduct, from how other people behave around them, and from what nobody says out loud. |
| The Reason a Character Will Not Give [H] | Work out what a character actually wants when the reason they offer is not the reason they have. |
| The Distance Between the Telling and the Told [H] | Measure the distance between what a narrator claims and what the same text shows. |
| The Object That Does the Work [H] | Read the object, gesture or image that carries what the sentence refuses to state. |
| Voice as Evidence [H] | Use word choice, sentence shape and sentence length as evidence about the person speaking. |
| Set Against Each Other [H] | Use one character to see another, without letting the contrast turn into a verdict. |
| Characters Who Do Not Add Up [H] | Hold two true and incompatible things about one character at the same time instead of choosing between them. |
| What Changes, and What It Costs [H] | Locate the turn in a character, and say what the change leaves untouched and what it costs. |
| Stating a Theme as a Claim [H] | Write a theme as a sentence somebody could argue with, not a noun. |
| The Evidence a Theme Rests On [H] | Support a claim about theme with the detail that would break it if removed. |
| Motif: What Keeps Coming Back [H] | Track a repeating image or word, then say what changes between its first appearance and its last. |
| When an Object Starts Carrying the Meaning [H] | Read a symbol by the gap between what an object does and what the text keeps it for. |
| The Central Argument of a Nonfiction Text [H] | Name the one thing a writer wants conceded, as distinct from the subject. |
| Concession, Rebuttal, and What They Cost [H] | Tell a granted point from a denied one, and say what the writer bought with it. |
| Two Readings, One Text [H] | Say what a text settles, what it declines to settle, and which reading the evidence rules out. |
| How a Theme Gets Built [H] | Follow an idea from its first appearance through the place it is complicated to its last. |
| The Shape of the Whole [H] | Name how a narrative is arranged, separately from what happens in it. |
| Story Time and Telling Time [H] | Separate the order events happened in from the order the text reveals them. |
| Where the Story Turns [H] | Find the hinge - the point after which the same events mean something else. |
| Scene, Summary, and the Skipped Year [H] | Read the ratio between page time and story time as a statement of emphasis. |
| What the Structure Withholds [H] | Treat a missing piece as a shaped choice rather than an accident. |
| The Story Inside the Story [H] | Read the outer situation that contains a telling, not only the telling. |
| Strands Set Against Each Other [H] | Read the seam between two strands, where the writer has left the connection out. |
| How an Ending Works [H] | Judge an ending by what it does to the text behind it, not by what it settles. |
| Where the Line Stops [H] | Read a line break as a decision, and say what the break is doing. |
| The Shape the Poem Agreed To [H] | Identify a poem's form and say what obeying it costs and buys. |
| Counting the Beat, and What Breaks It [H] | Hear a poem's metrical pattern and read the places where it departs. |
| Rhyme, Near Rhyme and What They Yoke [H] | Read a rhyme scheme, hear a near rhyme, and say what the pairing does. |
| What the Sound Is Doing [H] | Name a sound pattern in a line and say what it does to the reading. |
| The Line That Comes Back [H] | Read a repeated line for what has changed around it. |
| The Image That Carries the Argument [H] | Read a concrete detail for the claim it is making without stating it. |
| The Voice and What It Will Not Say [H] | Identify a poem's speaker and read the gap between what is said and known. |
| Verse, Prose, and the Moment of the Switch [H] | Read the register a character is speaking in, and read what a change of register means. |
| Soliloquy and Aside [H] | Read a character thinking alone, and treat that thinking as an argument rather than a confession. |
| The Stage Directions Inside the Dialogue [H] | Reconstruct what happens physically on stage from the lines themselves. |
| Quibbles: One Word Doing Two Jobs [H] | Read a pun as an argument being made, not as a joke interrupting one. |
| Image Patterns and What They Argue [H] | Follow an image across a scene and say what claim it is quietly making. |
| What the Line Does Not Say [H] | Read the meaning a character conveys by refusing to state it. |
| What the Audience Knows [H] | Track the gap between what the audience knows and what a character knows, and say what the gap does to a line. |
| Persuasion in Front of an Audience [H] | Analyze a stage speech as a set of moves aimed at the people standing there. |
| Reading the Period Off the Page [H] | Name the period habits a text is using from the writing itself, without being told the label. |
| Evidence for a Claim About a Text [H] | Test a claim about a text against the detail that would actually settle it. |
| Form Carries the History [H] | Explain what a technical choice about narration asserts about what can be known. |
| The Moment That Made the Text [H] | Connect what a text worries about to the conditions it was written in - and say how far the connection reaches. |
| Movements Answer Other Movements [H] | Identify what a text is refusing, and read the refusal as part of its argument. |
| One Subject, Two Periods [H] | Compare two treatments of the same material and locate exactly where the periods part. |
| Reading a Text Forward, Not Backward [H] | Keep a later fact, a later word, or a later verdict from being smuggled into a reading. |
| Who Gets Counted In [H] | Ask how a movement's roster was assembled, and what a roster can and cannot measure. |
| Verbal Irony: Words Against Meaning [H] | Detect a speaker who means something other than what the words say, and name what the gap is doing. |
| Situational Irony: Aim Against Outcome [H] | Tell an ironic outcome from a merely unfortunate one by testing it against the aim that produced it. |
| Dramatic Irony: What the Audience Carries [H] | Track what a reader knows that a character does not, and say what the gap does to the lines that follow. |
| The Gap Between a Speaker and the Text [H] | Measure the distance between what a speaker claims about himself and what the text puts on the page - including when the distance is zero. |
| Satire: Finding the Target [H] | Separate what a satire pretends to be from what it wants you to think worse of. |
| How Satire Works on a Reader [H] | Name the technique a satire is using and say what it buys that a plain complaint could not. |
| Is It Irony at All? [H] | Decide whether a text is ironic by naming the gap, rather than by how the text makes you feel. |
| Ambiguity: What a Text Refuses to Settle [H] | Say what a text settles, what it deliberately leaves open, and which readings its evidence rules out. |
| Exigence: What Made This Necessary [H] | Identify the pressure that called a text into being, and separate it from the occasion. |
| The Audience Under the Audience [H] | Tell apart who a text is addressed to, who it is written for, and who is meant to overhear it. |
| The Speaker Is a Construction [H] | Describe the version of a writer that a text builds, and why that version fits the situation. |
| Stated Purpose and Working Purpose [H] | Separate what a text says it is doing from the job it is actually built to do. |
| What the Writer Was Not Free to Say [H] | Find the limits a situation places on a text, and read what those limits shaped. |
| Kairos: Why Now [H] | Judge how a text's timing changes what it can accomplish. |
| The Shape the Medium Demands [H] | Explain how the form a text is delivered in changes what it can and cannot do. |
| When a Text Changes Situations [H] | Track what happens to a text's meaning when it is carried out of the situation it was written for. |
| Ethos: The Credit a Text Builds [H] | Identify how a text earns, spends or refuses the reader's trust. |
| Pathos: Feeling Put to Work [H] | Explain how a text produces feeling, and what the feeling is being asked to do. |
| Logos: The Part That Survives Dislike [H] | Test the reasoning and evidence in an argument on its own terms. |
| Which Appeal Is Carrying the Weight [H] | Decide which appeal a move depends on when a move is doing more than one thing. |
| Giving Ground on Purpose [H] | Analyze a concession as a trade: what was surrendered, and what it bought. |
| Word Choice as Strategy [H] | Explain what a chosen word does that its plainest alternative would not. |
| Arrangement, Repetition and the Short Sentence [H] | Show how sentence shape and order do persuasive work that the words alone do not. |
| Would This Move Land on This Reader [H] | Judge a strategy against the audience it was aimed at, including what it risks. |
| Finding the Claim [H] | Locate the exact proposition an argument is asking you to accept. |
| What the Evidence Can Carry [H] | Judge evidence by relevance, sufficiency and where it came from, not by how impressive it sounds. |
| The Reasoning in Between [H] | Name the unwritten step that connects a piece of evidence to the claim it is offered for. |
| What the Argument Is Standing On [H] | Surface the unstated premise an argument needs, and test what happens if it fails. |
| Concession, Rebuttal, and the Difference [H] | Tell apart granting a point, answering it, and refusing to engage with it. |
| Where the Reasoning Breaks [H] | Name what has gone wrong in a piece of reasoning, precisely enough to say what would fix it. |
| How Far the Claim Reaches [H] | Match the size of a claim to the size of the evidence behind it. |
| What Would Settle It [H] | Compare two arguments by asking what evidence would decide between them. |
| Attacking the Arguer [H] | Separate an attack on the person from a fair reason to check their evidence. |
| The Position Nobody Took [H] | Tell a reply that answers the stated position from one that answers an invented version of it. |
| After Is Not Because [H] | Test a causal claim against timing, confounding and the direction of the arrow. |
| The Sample That Chose Itself [H] | Judge a generalization by how its cases were gathered, not by how many there are. |
| Only Two Doors [H] | Tell a manufactured either/or from a choice that really does come down to two. |
| The Chain With No Links [H] | Test a chain of predicted consequences link by link for the mechanism that would carry it. |
| Borrowed Authority [H] | Weigh an appeal to expertise, numbers or tradition by what the source actually examined. |
| The Word That Changed Sides [H] | Track a key word through an argument and catch it changing meaning partway. |
| Naming the Flaw [H] | Say precisely which defect an argument has - and say when it has none. |
| The Question the Sources Are Arguing About [H] | State the proposition a set of sources is actually at issue over, and what each one is answering. |
| How One Source Stands to Another [H] | Describe the relation between two sources more precisely than agree or disagree. |
| Comparing Like with Like [H] | Test whether two pieces of evidence are about the same object, population, period and definition before setting them side by side. |
| Real Conflict and Apparent Conflict [H] | Tell a genuine contradiction from two sources measuring different things, and locate where a real one would have to live. |
| Putting a Source to Work [H] | Use a source inside your own argument instead of summarizing it in turn. |
| What a Source Can Be Cited For [H] | Match the claim you make to what the source actually measured. |
| Staking a Position the Sources Support [H] | Write a thesis that is neither a summary of the sources nor a refusal to choose between them. |
| What the Set Cannot Settle [H] | Name the question a source set leaves open and the evidence that would close it. |
| Who Made This, and What Were They Rewarded For [H] | Judge a source by its expertise, its incentives and what it discloses - without treating an interest as a verdict. |
| Checking a Source by Leaving It [H] | Verify a claim from outside the page that makes it, using independent records rather than the page's own account of itself. |
| Following a Claim Back to Its Origin [H] | Trace a reported finding through each retelling to the document it started in, and name what changed on the way. |
| The Frame Around the Facts [H] | Analyze how headline, emphasis, order and image shape a reader's conclusion without any sentence being false. |
| Numbers That Are True and Misleading [H] | Interrogate a statistic for its denominator, its base rate, its measurement and how its sample was drawn. |
| Does the Evidence Reach the Conclusion [H] | Test whether the evidence offered actually supports the claim made, and name what would count against it. |
| Why This Reached You [H] | Explain how ranking, sharing and timing decide what you see, and why a feed cannot measure how common a view is. |
| Is the Evidence What It Claims to Be [H] | Test whether an image, clip or recording is genuine and correctly placed - and say so when the answer is that you cannot tell. |
| Same Fact, Different Verdict [H] | Choose the word that carries the verdict you want without changing the claim you are making. |
| How Strong Is Too Strong [H] | Pick the rung of a word ladder the evidence actually supports. |
| Where the Judgment Is Hiding [H] | Find the word that is arguing inside a sentence of facts, and take it out without losing anything. |
| Softening It and Sharpening It [H] | Tell a euphemism from a plain statement, and a strong true sentence from one that overclaims. |
| The Level of the Diction [H] | Match the level of your words to the occasion, and tell inflated diction from necessary technical language. |
| Naming a Tone Precisely [H] | Name a writer's attitude with the word the evidence supports, not the nearest feeling. |
| Where the Tone Turns [H] | Locate the sentence where a writer's attitude changes, with or without a signal word. |
| What the Word Choices Add Up To [H] | Read a writer's position out of an accumulation of choices he never states as an opinion. |
| Which Clause the Reader Believes [H] | Put the fact you are asserting in the main clause and the fact you are conceding in the subordinate one. |
| Items That Have to Match [H] | Keep every item in a series - and every half of a not only / but also pair - in the same grammatical form. |
| The Phrase That Grabs the Wrong Subject [H] | Check what an opening phrase actually attaches to, and repair it without changing who did what. |
| What a Limiting Word Limits [H] | Place only, just and even where they belong, and pin a modifier that could belong to either side of it. |
| Adding Detail Without Adding a Sentence [H] | Name and build the four free modifiers: appositive, participial phrase, relative clause and absolute phrase. |
| Semicolon, Colon, Dash [H] | Choose the mark the joint between two clauses actually calls for, and keep a comma-heavy list readable. |
| Active, Passive, and the Missing Actor [H] | Identify the passive, name what it leaves out, and tell when leaving the actor out is the honest choice. |
| Where the Main Clause Falls [H] | Tell a periodic sentence from a cumulative one, and rebuild either into the other without changing what it reports. |
| What the Parts Can and Cannot Tell You [H] | Narrow an unfamiliar academic word with its parts, then let the sentence choose. |
| Words That Are Not Interchangeable [H] | Hold apart two academic words that look almost the same and claim different things. |
| When an Ordinary Word Is a Technical Term [H] | Read a familiar word in the exact sense its field gives it, and restate it without smuggling the everyday sense back in. |
| The Phrases Academic Prose Is Built From [H] | Choose the verb that a fixed academic phrase actually takes. |
| The Word That Names the Logical Move [H] | Pick the connective that states the exact relation between two claims. |
| Saying What a Source Did [H] | Characterize another writer's move with a verb that claims exactly what she claimed. |
| Exactly How Much Is Being Claimed [H] | Choose the wording that claims precisely what a record supports, and name the fault when a claim outruns it. |
| What an Assignment Verb Demands [H] | Name the move a high school or college prompt is asking for before you start writing. |
| The Thesis Somebody Could Refuse [H] | Write a thesis that is arguable, specific, and binding on the essay that follows. |
| The Order of the Reasons [H] | Arrange an argument so each paragraph makes the next one possible. |
| What a Body Paragraph Owes [H] | Open a paragraph with a claim it can finish, and keep the paragraph to that claim. |
| Putting Evidence Into a Sentence [H] | Choose, frame and attribute evidence so a reader knows where it came from and what it is for. |
| The Sentences After the Evidence [H] | Write the reasoning that turns a piece of evidence into support for your claim. |
| Where the Other Side Goes [H] | Place, state and answer an objection so the reader's own doubt is dealt with. |
| The Seam Between Paragraphs [H] | Join paragraphs by naming the relationship between them, not by announcing that another one is coming. |
| Openings and Endings That Earn Their Space [H] | Open with the situation the argument is answering, and close with something the reader did not already have. |
| The Analytical Thesis [H] | Write a thesis that claims how a text works, not what it contains. |
| From Choice to Effect [H] | Say what a rhetorical choice does, not merely that it was made. |
| Summary Is Not Analysis [H] | Tell the difference between retelling a source and claiming something about it. |
| Choosing and Framing the Quotation [H] | Pick the words the claim turns on, and frame them so they do work. |
| The Line of Reasoning [H] | Order body paragraphs so each claim is made possible by the one before it. |
| Grounding the Analysis in Its Occasion [H] | Tie every claim about effect to a real audience, occasion and exigence. |
| Verbs, Hedges and the Analyst's Voice [H] | Choose verbs that carry a claim, and claim only what the text supports. |
| Revising a Rhetorical Analysis [H] | Diagnose a draft's structure before polishing any of its sentences. |
| The Question a Search Can Finish [H] | Turn a topic into a research question that names what would count as an answer. |
| The Source That Can Answer This Claim [H] | Match a claim to the kind of record that could contain it, rather than to a general ranking of sources. |
| What This Source Was Built to Know [H] | Interrogate a source by its method and its purpose rather than by whether you like its conclusion. |
| Paraphrase, Patchwriting and the Line Between [H] | Rebuild a source's idea in your own architecture instead of translating its sentence word by word. |
| Which Sentences Owe a Citation [H] | Decide what a sentence owes a source by asking what was taken, not by counting matching words. |
| Saying What the Source Can Support [H] | Report a source so that a reader who could see the whole of it would call your sentence fair. |
| Reading a Citation Before Reading the Source [H] | Read what an entry and its locator already tell you about a source you have not opened. |
| Where the Line Actually Is [H] | Reason about an academic integrity case by asking what a reader has been told, not what the writer intended. |
| Exigence: Why Now [H] | Identify the pressure that makes a text worth producing at a particular moment, and what a writer does when there isn't one. |
| The Speaker the Text Builds [H] | Describe the version of a speaker that a text constructs, and the moves that construct it. |
| Appeals as Choices, Not Labels [H] | Explain what a particular appeal is doing to a particular audience, without stopping at a name for it. |
| Where the Argument Puts Things [H] | Explain what the order of a text accomplishes, and what a different order would have cost. |
| Conceding, Qualifying, Refusing [H] | Track exactly what a writer gives away to the other side, and what the giving buys. |
| What the Evidence Is Doing [H] | Say what a piece of evidence measures, what claim it is attached to, and where it stops. |
| The Assumption Holding It Together [H] | Find the premise an argument needs but never defends, and test the argument by attacking it. |
| Tone, and What Restraint Costs [H] | Name a text's attitude precisely, and read the sentence shapes and omissions that produce it. |
| What the Prompt Is Actually Asking [H] | Take an exam prompt apart into the proposition, the reach and the materials before writing a word. |
| A Position Somebody Could Refuse [H] | Write a thesis an informed reader could disagree with, and qualify by naming a line rather than by hedging. |
| The Line of Reasoning [H] | Order the paragraphs the way the claim itself requires, so each one is a step the thesis needs. |
| Evidence, and the Sentence That Uses It [H] | Tell evidence from commentary, and write the sentence that says what the evidence establishes and how far. |
| Citing a Source for What It Can Carry [H] | Use a document for the claim it can actually support, and notice when it declined to take your side. |
| Building an Argument Out of a Set [H] | Give a synthesis essay the shape of your argument instead of the shape of the file. |
| The Concession That Costs Something [H] | Grant a real point and then show why you can still pay for it, on the objection's own subject. |
| Complexity, and the Ways It Is Faked [H] | Earn a sophisticated argument by doing something, not by sounding like somebody who has. |
| Whose Words Are on the Page [H] | Track how close the narration stands to a character, and catch the moments it borrows that character's own language. |
| The Detail That Was Chosen [H] | Explain why one specific object, gesture or number is in the passage when a hundred others were available. |
| What the Sentence Is Shaped Like [H] | Read sentence length, fragments, and the way clauses are joined as part of the meaning rather than as decoration. |
| What the Comparison Actually Claims [H] | Take a metaphor or simile apart and state the specific claim it is making, including where the comparison stops working. |
| Where the Passage Turns [H] | Locate the pivot in an excerpt and say what changes across it - in knowledge, in tone, or in who is in control. |
| Two True Things at Once [H] | Hold a character's contradictions together instead of resolving them into a single label. |
| A Claim the Passage Will Bear [H] | Tell a defensible interpretive claim from a plot summary on one side and an invention on the other. |
| The Line That Has to Hold It Up [H] | Choose the evidence that actually bears the weight of a claim, and recognize when a quotation only looks relevant. |
| The Speaker and the Situation [H] | Reconstruct who is speaking in a poem, to whom, from what position, and what has just happened to put them there. |
| Imagery as Evidence [H] | Read a concrete image as the evidence a poem offers, rather than translating it into an abstraction. |
| What a Figure Commits To [H] | Explain what a metaphor, personification or direct address makes true in a poem, and what it costs, instead of naming the device. |
| Diction, Connotation and Register [H] | Trace a word back to the world it comes from, and say what importing that world does to the poem. |
| Tone and the Turn [H] | Name a poem's attitude in terms complex enough to be true, and locate the point where it changes. |
| Form, Line and Syntax [H] | Explain what a line break, a stanza shape, a sentence length or a fixed form does that prose could not do. |
| Ambiguity: What a Poem Will Not Settle [H] | Distinguish real ambiguity, which the text sustains, from vagueness and from a reading a line refutes. |
| From Reading to Interpretive Claim [H] | Tell a defensible interpretive claim from a summary, a topic, or a generalization the poem itself would refute. |
| A Thesis Somebody Could Refuse [H] | Tell a defensible interpretive claim from a summary, an observation, or an assertion the text cannot carry. |
| What the Question Is Actually Asking [H] | Read a literary argument prompt for the task it sets, not the topic it names. |
| Evidence That Bears Weight [H] | Choose the line whose best explanation is your claim, and recognize evidence that only looks relevant. |
| The Sentence After the Quotation [H] | Write the step that carries a quotation to a claim, instead of saying the quotation again. |
| A Line of Reasoning, Not a List [H] | Order an argument so that each step needs the one before it, and spot a body that only lists. |
| The Reading That Cuts Against You [H] | Find the strongest rival reading, and answer it with a concession that does not give your claim away. |
| An Interpretation of the Work as a Whole [H] | Take a claim about one moment and turn it into a claim the whole work has to answer for. |
| Complexity Without Overreach [H] | Hold two true things at once, size a claim to its evidence, and tell genuine complexity from hedging. |
| The Speaker a Text Invents [H] | Tell the writer apart from the speaker the writing constructs, and say what that speaker is built to buy. |
| How the Case Is Built [H] | Follow the moves an argument makes - premise, concession, reframe - without deciding who was right. |
| Testimony and the Problem of Proof [H] | Work out what a text does to make itself believable, and what that requirement cost the person telling it. |
| Whose Words Are on the Page [H] | Track the hands a text passed through on its way to you, and say what each of them decided. |
| What the Narrator Will Not Say [H] | Read a narrator's evasions, denials and repetitions as evidence about what is actually going on. |
| The Object That Carries the Meaning [H] | State what a recurring object claims, and where the claim stops holding. |
| Tone, and Where a Text Turns [H] | Name a writer's attitude precisely, and locate the sentence where it changes. |
| Building a Defensible Reading [H] | Separate a claim the text will bear from a plot summary on one side and an invention on the other. |
| Realism and the Weight of the Ordinary [H] | Read a realist text by asking what its ordinary, checkable details are made to carry. |
| Naturalism: Force, Chance, and an Indifferent World [H] | Tell a story where the situation does the deciding from one where a person does. |
| Voice, Dialect, and Who Is Holding the Pen [H] | Work out whose language is on the page and what a way of speaking is being made to do. |
| What the Modernists Left Out [H] | Read a deliberate silence - what a text could have explained and refuses to. |
| The Image That Does the Arguing [H] | Read a concrete image as a claim, and notice what a stated moral costs a poem. |
| Writing to Two Rooms at Once [H] | Read a text written for two audiences that want different things from the same page. |
| The Narrator Who Will Not Editorialize [H] | Read tone in a text that reports and refuses to judge. |
| Claims About Periods, and the Evidence for Them [H] | Test a claim that a text belongs to a movement against what the text actually does. |
| The Word the Text Will Not Explain [H] | Read an unglossed word or reference for what the refusal to explain it says about who the text is written for. |
| Two Claims on One Person [H] | Read a character who belongs to two places without collapsing the position into confusion or injury. |
| The Older Voice and the Younger Story [H] | Read the distance between the person who lived an event and the person now telling it. |
| Why It Is Told in That Order [H] | Read the arrangement of a fragmented or nonlinear text as an argument the text is making. |
| Carrying a Story You Did Not Live [H] | Read secondhand memory by following the chain of custody and locating where the record stops. |
| Who the Text Is Talking To [H] | Identify who a text addresses, and read a second-person pronoun for the specific person it is really carrying. |
| The One Rule the Story Changed [H] | Read a realistic text with one impossible element by watching the register that reports it. |
| Testing a Label Against the Text [H] | Treat a claim about what kind of book something is as a prediction, and test it against what the text actually does. |
| What the Line Is Doing [H] | Read the shape of a text - line, stanza, frame, verse against prose - as part of what it means rather than as the box the meaning came in. |
| The Word and Where It Came From [H] | Hear a word's register - plain or learned, native or imported - and say what choosing that register does to the sentence around it. |
| The Figure That Does the Thinking [H] | Read an allegorical figure, an emblem or an extended conceit as an argument being carried out, rather than decoding it into a single word. |
| The Speaker a Text Builds [H] | Separate the writer from the speaker the writing constructs, and say what that constructed speaker is built to accomplish. |
| What the Text Knows and the Speaker Does Not [H] | Locate the gap between what a speaker says and what the text lets a reader see, and say who is standing on each side of it. |
| What the Text Will Not Say [H] | Work out what a text has deliberately left out, and hold the difference between what its silence supports and what it merely permits. |
| How a Poem Reasons [H] | Trace the case a literary text is making - its premises, its concessions and its turn - without being asked whether you agree with it. |
| How the Words Reached You [H] | Ask how a text physically got to the page in front of you, and say what that history does to a claim about what the text says. |
| The Voice on the Page Is a Made Thing [H] | Work out who is speaking, to whom, and what they want from being believed. |
| What the Text Will Not Say [H] | Read the meaning a text carries in its evasions, pauses and unasked-for denials. |
| The Image That Does the Arguing [H] | Read a figure as a move in an argument rather than as an ornament on one. |
| Tone, and the Distance a Writer Keeps [H] | Hear the attitude a text takes toward its material and toward you. |
| Form as an Argument [H] | Explain what a form promises a reader, and what a writer's departure from it means. |
| A Theme Held Open [H] | State what a text argues about how things are, and then test it on the part that resists. |
| Movements in Argument With Each Other [H] | Read a text against what it was written to oppose, and ask who wrote the label you are using. |
| The Line That Settles It [H] | Choose the quotation that separates your reading from the nearest rival reading. |
| The Machinery in Plain Sight [H] | Read a repeated phrase, a fixed opening or a stock scene as equipment a performer needs, and then ask where this writer chose to put it. |
| The Comparison Brings Its Own World [H] | Read an extended comparison as an argument, asking what world it imports and whose side that world turns out to be on. |
| What the Culture Is Paying For [H] | Work out what a heroic story treats as the reward, and read the hero as an argument a culture is having with itself. |
| Two Full Explanations, Both Kept [H] | Hold a divine cause and a human cause in the same event without letting one of them cancel the other. |
| Where the Poem Puts the Cut [H] | Follow how an epic is arranged - the digression, the ring, the delayed return - and say what the arrangement is for. |
| The Audience Knows First [H] | Track the gap between what an audience has worked out and what a character still believes, and say what the gap is doing. |
| Who Is Given a Line [H] | Notice who a victory story lets speak, who it keeps offstage, and what the arrangement is doing. |
| How the Words Got Here [H] | Ask by what route a text reached you, and what the route did to it, before arguing about what it means. |
| Every Line Is a Decision [H] | Read a translated sentence as one option that somebody selected, and name what the selection ruled out. |
| Two Versions, One Original [H] | Compare two renderings of the same text and say precisely what each one bought and what it paid. |
| The Word That Takes a Paragraph [H] | Name the four things a translator can do with a term that has no English equivalent, and what each one costs. |
| What Happens to the Shape [H] | Track what a poem's meter, rhyme and repetition do when they meet a language that cannot supply them. |
| The Voice the Translator Picks [H] | Hear the level of a translated voice - formal or plain, warm or official - and ask what the choice does to the speaker. |
| What the First Readers Already Knew [H] | Spot the knowledge an original audience brought to a text, and judge how a translation handles a reader who does not have it. |
| The Apparatus Around the Text [H] | Read the title, cover, introduction and notes as arguments about how the book inside should be taken. |
| Judging a Translation You Cannot Check [H] | Build an argument about a translation using evidence a reader without the source language actually has. |
| The Shape You Brought With You [H] | Name the pattern you think you are seeing, then test whether it is in the text or in you. |
| There Is No Original [H] | Treat the text in front of you as one version among others, and say what that version does differently. |
| The Room the Story Was Told In [H] | Reconstruct the teller, the listener and the occasion before deciding what a traditional story means. |
| Motif, Symbol, Archetype [H] | Name the level of the thing you noticed, and say what evidence a claim at that level would need. |
| What the Story Authorizes [H] | Identify what a myth or tale accounts for in the listener's own world, and what would be unsettled without it. |
| The Lesson That Arrives from Outside [H] | Separate the lesson printed at the end of a tale from what the tale itself shows, and say who attached it. |
| What a Change of Body Costs [H] | Read a transformation as an event with consequences, and say what the new form is afterward used for. |
| Who Is Described and Who Speaks [H] | Count who speaks in their own voice, who is only reported, and who appears in a story without appearing in the record of it. |
| Scene and Summary [H] | Tell a single dramatized moment from a stretch of time compressed, and find the sentence where one becomes the other. |
| Showing a State, and Only That State [H] | Write behavior a reader can name one particular feeling from, instead of naming it for them or labeling the gesture you just wrote. |
| Filter Verbs, and the One That Has to Stay [H] | Cut saw, heard, felt and noticed where they only add distance, and keep them where they are the only thing holding a belief apart from a fact. |
| What This Narrator Can Know [H] | Hold a story to what its narrator can see, hear or think, and tell a character's inference from the narration's own claim. |
| Tags, Beats and What Goes Between Them [H] | Punctuate a dialogue tag, an action beat, and a quotation interrupted in the middle by its tag. |
| Information a Character Would Not Say [H] | Spot the line that exists to inform the reader, and tell it from a line that raises the same history for a reason of its own. |
| The Detail That Does Two Jobs [H] | Choose the concrete detail a reader can reach the withheld conclusion from, instead of a detail that is merely vivid. |
| What the Scene Changes [H] | Find the sentence where a scene changes what a character knows, what they can still take back, or what the next scene is able to do. |
| The Image Instead of the Statement [H] | Put a thing in front of the reader's senses instead of naming the feeling you want them to have. |
| Naming the Figure Exactly [H] | Tell seven figures of speech apart by what each one actually does to the sentence. |
| What the Sounds Are Doing [H] | Name the sound device a line is built on, and say where in the words the repetition sits. |
| True, Slant, and Eye Rhyme [H] | Judge a rhyme with your ear instead of your eye, and name the four kinds a poet can use. |
| Reading a Rhyme Scheme [H] | Label the pattern of line endings in a stanza with letters, including when the rhymes are slant. |
| Scanning a Line [H] | Count a line's syllables, hear where the stresses fall, and name the meter that results. |
| Where the Line Breaks [H] | Tell an end-stopped line from an enjambed one, and see what a break does to the words on either side of it. |
| Fixed Forms and Free Verse [H] | Identify the fixed forms by the promises each one makes about length, repetition, rhyme, and meter. |
| Revising a Poem [H] | Find the three cuts - the worn comparison, the mixed picture, and the line that explains the poem - that improve a draft more than any addition would. |
| The Lede and What It Promises [H] | Read a news lede for the fact it selects and the story it obligates the rest of the piece to deliver. |
| How a News Story Is Stacked [H] | Explain why a news story is ordered by a reader's need rather than by time, and predict what disappears when it is cut. |
| Who Says So [H] | Trace every sentence in a report to what the reporter saw, what a document says, or what a person claimed - and notice when a verb adds a judgment. |
| On the Record, and What Anonymity Costs [H] | Weigh a source by the condition they spoke under, the reason they are unnamed, and what the paper did besides take their word. |
| What a Quotation Is For [H] | Decide when a speaker's exact words earn their space and when a paraphrase serves the reader better. |
| News, Analysis, Editorial, Column [H] | Tell the four kinds of newspaper writing apart from the sentences themselves rather than from the label above them. |
| Balance, Weight and the Manufactured Middle [H] | Separate how much space each side of a story receives from what stands behind each side's claims, and name what the reporting has not settled. |
| Names, Harm and What a Paper Owes Afterward [H] | Judge a newsroom decision by what it costs the person it lands on, what it gives the reader, and whether the paper disclosed that it made a choice. |
| Meeting the Argument [H] | Decide whether a reply actually answered the argument in front of it, or landed somewhere beside it. |
| If It Ends Even [H] | Say which side has to prove what, and what follows when nobody has proved it. |
| The Sentence That Decides [H] | Find the term whose meaning settles the dispute, and see what each proposed meaning would decide. |
| What the Question Is Doing [H] | Read a question in a cross-examination or from a bench as a move, and name what it is trying to get. |
| When Both Sides Are Right [H] | Compare two proved harms out loud, using likelihood, size, timing and whether the thing can be undone. |
| Giving Ground on Purpose [H] | Recognize a concession as a move, and say what it costs and what it buys. |
| Evidence, and Labels on Evidence [H] | Separate what a source says from what a speaker says it says, and name the move when the two differ. |
| Built for the Ear [H] | Explain what a spoken argument does differently because a listener cannot go back. |
| What the Frame Left Out [H] | Read an image for the decision at its edges - what was excluded, and what the exclusion does to a viewer. |
| Everything Inside the Frame [H] | Say what the arrangement inside a shot - light, staging, color, selection - is doing to the viewer's reading of it. |
| The Argument in the Join [H] | Name the claim a cut makes by placing one shot next to another, and test whether the material supports it. |
| Speed, Duration, and the Unbroken Take [H] | Work out what a shot's length or speed is asserting, and which questions duration can and cannot settle. |
| The Track You Are Not Listening To [H] | Separate sound the characters can hear from sound only the audience can, and say what each one is telling the viewer to do. |
| Whose Account You Are Standing Inside [H] | Identify whose knowledge and whose interests an image places a viewer inside, and how that placement was built. |
| What an Image Can Prove [H] | State precisely what a photograph or a recording establishes, and where its authority stops. |
| What the Display Was Built to Answer [H] | Read a chart, poster or graphic as a made argument, without treating every design decision as a trick. |
| Following a Speech by Its Signposts [H] | Use a speaker's structural cues to hold the shape of an argument you cannot reread. |
| Naming the Move a Speaker Just Made [H] | Say what a speech is doing at a given turn, not merely what it is about. |
| The Concession and What It Buys [H] | Hear what a speaker gives away, and work out what giving it away purchased. |
| The Appeal That Is Doing Work [H] | Tell an appeal that carries a reason from one that only warms the room. |
| The Premise You Are Asked to Grant [H] | Catch the unstated premise a spoken argument needs you to accept. |
| How Big the Claim Actually Was [H] | Keep the limits a speaker put on a claim instead of remembering a bigger one. |
| Evidence Heard Once [H] | Separate what a speaker observed from what they concluded, and hear what a number counts. |
| The Distance Between the Argument and the Ask [H] | Measure how far a speaker's request reaches past what the argument established. |
| Words Science Uses Narrowly [H] | Read a technical term in its narrow sense instead of importing the everyday one. |
| Definitions That Are Really Instructions [H] | Find the sentence that says how something was measured, and see what it fixes. |
| What a Step Depends On [H] | Follow a technical procedure closely enough to say why a step is where it is. |
| The Table Inside the Prose [H] | Pull a quantitative pattern out of numbers that are printed in sentences. |
| Measurement or Inference [H] | Separate what a study observed from what it concluded, and name what the step between them rests on. |
| What a Control Rules Out [H] | Say which rival explanation a control eliminates, and which ones survive it. |
| What a Result Does Not License [H] | Hold a finding to the conditions, the range and the group it actually came from. |
| How a Technical Account Is Built [H] | Use the shape of a technical text to tell what each part is for. |
| Who Made This, and For Whom [H] | Read a document's provenance before its sentences, and say what that provenance lets it be evidence of. |
| What the Writer Could Actually Know [H] | Separate what a writer saw, counted or was told, and weigh each claim by the position it was made from. |
| What the Date Does to the Evidence [H] | Use when a document was written to decide what it can be evidence of, rather than to rank it against other accounts. |
| Who Was Meant to Read It [H] | Trace how the intended reader shapes what a document says, omits, and concedes. |
| What the Document Takes For Granted [H] | Name the belief a document never argues for, and treat it as evidence of what its readers were expected to grant. |
| Where Two Accounts Come Apart [H] | Compare two records of one event, locate what each was measuring, and name the third source that would settle it. |
| What Happened and Why It Happened [H] | Tell a claim about events apart from a claim about causes, and hold each to the evidence its kind requires. |
| What Is Not in the Document [H] | Judge what an omission can and cannot prove, using what the document was built to record. |
| Building a Meaning Out of the Parts [H] | Build a working meaning for a word you have never seen, from its parts, and let the sentence decide which reading survives. |
| The Prefix That Changed Its Spelling [H] | Find a Latin prefix that has taken the shape of the root behind it. |
| One Root, and the Prefix Decides [H] | Choose between words off one root, where the prefix is the whole remaining question. |
| What the Ending Does to the Word [H] | Read an ending as a claim about what is going on, not as a decoration on the base word. |
| Roots That Are Only Pretending [H] | Test a root by meaning rather than by letters, and catch the words that only look as though they have one. |
| Why the Word Is Spelled Like That [H] | Explain an English spelling by where the word came from, and read a spelling as evidence of an origin. |
| How a Word Got Where It Is [H] | Name the two ways a word's meaning moves, and read an etymology for what it actually explains. |
| Terms Built for One Field [H] | Read a technical term you have never seen by reading the classical parts it is assembled from. |
| The Splice and the Semicolon [H] | Tell a comma splice from a sentence whose comma is doing legitimate work, and choose the mark the joint actually calls for. |
| What Has to Come Before a Colon [H] | Apply the one test a colon has to pass: whatever stands in front of it must be able to end there. |
| Dashes, Commas, or Parentheses [H] | Mark an interruption with a pair that matches and closes, and read what the writer's choice of mark tells you. |
| Commas That Change Who You Mean [H] | Read a pair of commas around a clause as a claim about how many, and punctuate to say the one you mean. |
| Apostrophes in the Hard Cases [H] | Form a possessive by making the plural first, and keep joint possession, family names and plain plurals straight. |
| The Hyphen in a Compound Modifier [H] | Hyphenate words that work as one modifier in front of a noun, and read what a hyphen changes about the meaning. |
| Agreement Across a Phrase, a Group, and an Everyone [H] | Find the real subject of each verb when a phrase, a collective noun or an indefinite pronoun stands in the way. |
| Pronouns That Could Mean Two People [H] | Catch a pronoun that is grammatical and still leaves a reader guessing, and fix it without inventing a fact. |
| The Paragraph That Says Why [H] | Match a stated result to the passage that explains how it came about, and see what that explanation predicts. |
| Following the Pathway [H] | Track a multi-step biological pathway across paragraphs and work out what a break at one step would do to the rest. |
| What the Comparison Was Built to Show [H] | Read a described study for its comparison group and say what the design can and cannot establish. |
| Who the Result Is About [H] | Find the group a result was measured in and judge how far it can travel from there. |
| Relative Change and Actual Size [H] | Read a reported change against the baseline it is a change from, and tell a ratio apart from a difference. |
| Settled, Likely, Contested [H] | Sort the claims in a science text by how firmly the author is willing to stand behind each one. |
| What Stands In for What [H] | Spot a measurement standing in for something else and name what the substitution leaves out. |
| The Cost Named Beside the Benefit [H] | Read how a health text sets a benefit against a harm, and tell weighing apart from arguing. |
| What a Proxy Record Stands For [H] | Separate the quantity an earth science record actually contains from the quantity the author is claiming. |
| How the Record Was Made [H] | Read the method well enough to say what a choice of instrument, site or procedure fixes about the result. |
| What a Record Can Resolve [H] | Judge what a record is too coarse to show, and stop reading its silences as evidence of nothing happening. |
| Reading a Range Instead of a Number [H] | Use a stated uncertainty to decide what a result does and does not settle. |
| Observed Trend, Attributed Cause [H] | Find the exact place where a text stops reporting what was measured and starts explaining why. |
| What the Model Was Asked [H] | Say what a model produces, what it assumed, and which questions it was never built to answer. |
| Words Earth Science Uses Narrowly [H] | Read a technical term in the narrow sense the field gives it rather than the everyday sense it looks like. |
| How Far a Result Travels [H] | State the boundary of a study in place, time and quantity, and refuse conclusions that cross it. |
| Shall, May, Must: Duty Against Discretion [H] | Tell what a legal text commands from what it merely permits, and say who is bound by each. |
| The Definition Section Runs the Document [H] | Read a defined term as the document defines it, and trace what a change in the definition does to every section that uses the word. |
| Conditions, Triggers, and Deadlines [H] | Find what must happen before a legal provision does anything, and work out what follows when the condition fails. |
| Scope, Exception, and Proviso [H] | Work out exactly who and what a provision covers, and what an exception takes back out of it. |
| Who Is Given the Power, and How Far It Reaches [H] | Identify a grant of power in a governing document and state the limits written around it. |
| When Two Provisions Collide [H] | Decide whether two provisions really conflict, and use the document's own rules to say which governs. |
| Holding, Reasoning, and What a Court Did Not Decide [H] | Separate what a court decided from what it merely said, and read a reservation as the open question it is. |
| How a Dissent Reads the Majority [H] | Locate the exact point where a separate opinion parts from the majority, and test its account of the majority against the words it quotes. |
| What the Number Actually Counts [H] | Say what a figure counts, what it is divided by, and what it leaves out, before letting it settle anything. |
| Compared With What [H] | Find the year, the group or the imagined alternative that a claim of change is measured against. |
| Who Ends Up Paying [H] | Separate the party who hands over the money from the party whose income is smaller once prices have adjusted. |
| How the Measure Is Supposed to Work [H] | Trace the chain of steps from an instrument to the result it promises, and name the link that could fail. |
| What the Estimate Takes For Granted [H] | Find the condition a projection needs in order to come true, especially when the document never states it. |
| How the Tradeoff Is Framed [H] | Describe what a writer has put on each side of a scale, in what units, and what was left off it entirely. |
| What People Do Next [H] | Predict how people rearrange themselves around a measure, and what that does to the numbers the measure was sold on. |
| What Has to Be True First [H] | Find the condition a document requires before a step, including the ones that are never printed as a step. |
| Which Branch You Are On [H] | Match a symptom to the one branch of a troubleshooting tree the document sends it to, and act on that branch only. |
| What a Specification Leaves Out [H] | Hold a rating, a range or a coverage term to the conditions it names, and read its silence as silence rather than as permission. |
| What the Warning Covers [H] | Read a hazard statement for the exact hazard it names and for what it leaves standing. |
| Must, Should, and May [H] | Tell a requirement from a recommendation from a permission, and say whose duty each one is. |
| Words the Document Defines for Itself [H] | Carry a document's own definition of a term to every later sentence that uses it, even where the ordinary sense would read smoothly. |
| Where the Wording Could Go Two Ways [H] | Locate the sentence two careful readers would carry out two different ways, and say what each reading would do. |
| How a Manual Is Put Together [H] | Use a document's architecture - sections, notes, cross-references and precedence rules - to find what governs and where it lives. |
| The Sense the Sentence Chose [H] | Say which of a familiar word's several meanings a particular sentence has selected. |
| What Did the Deciding [H] | Name the part of a sentence that settles which meaning a word is carrying. |
| What Job the Word Is Doing [H] | Use the grammatical slot a word is standing in to rule out the meanings it cannot be carrying. |
| Find the Sentence That Means It [H] | Work backward from a stated meaning to the sentence that actually puts the word to that use. |
| One Word, Every Blank [H] | Find the single word that fills several blanks at once, carrying a different meaning in each. |
| The Same Word Twice [H] | Compare two sentences that share a word and decide whether they share its meaning. |
| Words That Face Both Ways [H] | Read a word that carries two opposite meanings and let the sentence settle which one is in play. |
| The Meaning That Moves Mid-Argument [H] | Catch an argument that quietly changes what one of its own words means between the premise and the conclusion. |
| What a Fixed Phrase Actually Means [H] | Read a fixed phrase for the meaning it carries, not for the meaning its words add up to. |
| The Picture Inside the Phrase [H] | Write a fixed phrase the way it is actually fixed, by recovering the picture the words came out of. |
| One Verb, Four Particles, Four Meanings [H] | Read a phrasal verb as a single unit, where the small word after the verb is the word that decides the meaning. |
| What a Reference Is Claiming [H] | Say which one feature of a shared story a writer is borrowing, and hold it apart from everything else the story contains. |
| Choosing the Reference That Fits [H] | Match a situation to the reference whose shape it actually has, rather than to the one whose mood it shares. |
| Figures the Language Chose, Figures the Writer Chose [H] | Tell a metaphor that is simply the ordinary word for a thing from one a writer built and means you to see. |
| When a Dead Metaphor Wakes Up [H] | Catch the everyday phrase that becomes visible again because its own picture belongs to the subject, and repair it without losing the claim. |
| Mixed and Strained Figures [H] | Find the sentence whose two pictures cannot both be looked at, and repair it by finishing the picture it started in. |
| Hedge or Booster [H] | Tell a verb that only reports how a result sits with a claim from one that asserts the claim. |
| What a Quantifier Commits You To [H] | Read most, some, up to and at least as the exact sizes of claim they are. |
| Words That Claim a Cause [H] | Separate wording that reports two things traveling together from wording that says one moved the other. |
| What One Word Changed [H] | Say what a single word swapped into a sentence adds to, or takes away from, the claim. |
| Where the Claim Stops [H] | Read the phrase that says how far a claim reaches, and work out what a new result can and cannot touch. |
| A Hedge That Says Nothing [H] | Tell a hedge that names a real limit from one that only makes the claim impossible to check. |
| "No Evidence" Is Not "No Effect" [H] | Keep apart a report that a search came up empty and a report that there was nothing to find. |
| More Than What? [H] | Read a comparative claim for the baseline it is standing on and usually does not name. |
| The Sentence That Says It Twice [H] | Find the sentence in a draft that changes nothing a reader already knew, and cut it. |
| The Verb Buried in a Noun [H] | Move an action out of a noun and back into the verb - and leave it in the noun when the noun is doing work. |
| The Noun a Reader Can See [H] | Replace an abstract noun with the thing the draft has already named - without inventing a detail or narrowing the claim. |
| Where the Paragraph Breaks [H] | Put the paragraph break where the subject changes, not where the block of text starts to look long. |
| A Transition Is a Claim [H] | Choose the connective that names the relation two sentences actually stand in, and catch one that asserts a relation they do not. |
| What the Next Sentence Starts With [H] | Open each sentence on what the reader was just handed and save the new material for the end, so a paragraph pulls itself along. |
| When a Rule Should Be Broken [H] | Decide whether a fragment, a short sentence or a repeated word is doing work here - and put it back when it is not. |
| The Sentence That Breaks the Voice [H] | Find the sentence that steps out of the voice a draft has established - in level of language, or in the stance it takes. |
| The Thesis That Explains [H] | Open an explanatory essay with a thesis that promises understanding rather than a position to defend. |
| Organized by Idea, Not by Source [H] | Plan an explanation around the parts of the account rather than around the order the writer read things in. |
| Defining a Term the Reader Does Not Have [H] | Write a definition a reader who has never met the word could use to recognize a new instance. |
| The Comparison That Carries the Structure [H] | Choose a comparison that maps the mechanism, and say where it stops working. |
| Illustration, Not Proof [H] | Use a particular case to make an idea visible without claiming it establishes one. |
| Summarizing a Process, Explaining Why It Works [H] | Tell a sentence that reports a step from one that says why the step is needed. |
| Ending an Explanation [H] | Close an explanatory essay by consolidating the account instead of calling for action. |
| Where the Verdict Gets In [H] | Keep the writer's own judgment out of an explanation while still reporting the judgments other people made. |
| The Moment, Not the Year [H] | Choose one occasion small enough to show in full instead of a stretch of time that can only be summarized. |
| Where a Personal Essay Starts [H] | Open inside the occasion rather than in the background, the definition or the announcement in front of it. |
| The Sentence Only You Could Have Written [H] | Tell a detail that carries information nobody else could supply from one that any writer in the same situation would have. |
| Change You Can Watch Happen [H] | Show a change by putting the writer back into the same situation, instead of announcing that they are different now. |
| The Writer Then and the Writer Now [H] | Keep the earlier self limited to what it knew, and let the present self look back openly instead of smuggling knowledge into the scene. |
| The Sentence That Tells the Reader What to Feel [H] | Cut the sentence that names the size of a feeling and keep the one that gives a reader something to feel it from. |
| The Turn That Earns Its Insight [H] | Write the reflective turn so it names what the scene showed and goes one step past it, rather than asserting a lesson the scene never earned. |
| Ending Without Handing Down a Moral [H] | Close on the situation as it stands instead of a lesson, a pledge, a summary or a verdict on yourself. |
| What the Prompt Actually Asks [H] | Read a timed prompt for the job it sets rather than for the subject it is about. |
| What the Prompt Does Not Ask For [H] | Tell what a timed prompt requires from work it merely permits, and drop the second kind first. |
| The Two Minutes Before You Write [H] | Spend the first two minutes on the decisions a draft cannot be rewritten around. |
| The Position You Can Defend by the Bell [H] | Choose the position the available minutes and the available evidence can actually support. |
| What Fits Before the Bell [H] | Cut a plan down to what the clock can carry without dropping anything the prompt requires. |
| Where the Minutes Go [H] | Decide what to do next from the state of the draft and the minutes on the clock. |
| When to Abandon a Paragraph [H] | Decide whether a paragraph that has drifted should be cut, re-topped, trimmed, tied off, or left alone. |
| Four Minutes Left [H] | Spend the last minutes of a timed essay on the repair with the highest return that fits in the time. |
| The Preposition a Verb Expects [H] | Choose the preposition an English verb actually takes, and use the rest of the sentence when one verb takes two. |
| The Preposition an Adjective Expects [H] | Finish an adjective or a noun with the preposition it takes, and close a comparison built on a word that already carries one. |
| Words That Point One Way [H] | Decide which end of an exchange your subject is standing on, and choose the word or preposition that points that way. |
| The Verb That Takes an Object, and Its Twin [H] | Choose between lie and lay, sit and set, rise and raise by asking whether anything in the sentence is being acted on. |
| Pairs Where the Difference Does Work [H] | Choose between two real words whose difference changes what the sentence claims, using the evidence the sentence itself supplies. |
| What Is Actually Being Counted [H] | Choose fewer or less, number or amount, by asking whether the sentence counts things one at a time or measures a single quantity. |
| Comparing One Thing With the Same Kind of Thing [H] | Check that both sides of a comparison name the same kind of thing, and finish an incomplete comparison so it can be read only one way. |
| A Rule That Carries Meaning and One That Does Not [H] | Tell a change that alters what a sentence says from one that only obeys a rule English never had, and spend the editing pass on the first. |
| Words That Say It Twice [H] | Cut a modifier that repeats its own noun, and keep the one that rules something out. |
| The Five-Word Detour [H] | Replace a stock phrase with the single word it was standing in for, and notice when the single word would say something else. |
| The Opener That Reports Nothing [H] | Delete an opening that only delays the subject, and keep an opening that is carrying the claim. |
| A Clause That Could Be a Phrase [H] | Shrink a clause to a phrase when the facts survive it, and leave it alone when they do not. |
| Two Sentences, One Relation [H] | Fold two sentences into one so that the grammar carries the relation the draft stated, and no relation it did not. |
| When Shorter Says Less [H] | Trim a sentence to the point where the next cut would take a fact with it, and stop there. |
| A Cut That Lets In a Second Reading [H] | Spot the shortening that gives a sentence a meaning it did not have, and put back only the words that rule it out. |
| What a Section Is For [H] | Say what a paragraph or section does for the whole argument, not what it says. |
| Why It Comes in This Order [H] | Explain what the sequence of an argument assumes about its reader, and what a rearrangement would break. |
| What a Concession Buys [H] | Identify what a writer gives up in a long argument and what the surrender purchases. |
| The Sentence That Turns It [H] | Find the hinge of a long argument and say exactly what changes there. |
| The Example That Comes Back [H] | Explain what a returning image or example does the second time that it could not do the first. |
| What Would Be Lost [H] | Test a section by deleting it and naming precisely what the argument no longer has. |
| Where the Words Went [H] | Read the amount of space a writer spends as evidence of what the writer expects to be argued with about. |
| The Last Paragraph's Job [H] | Say what an ending does beyond summarizing, and what it deliberately leaves the reader holding. |
| Percent of What [H] | Find the quantity a percentage is a percentage of, and say what changes when a different quantity is put underneath it. |
| Absolute Change and Relative Change [H] | Report a change both ways - as a count and as a proportion of where it started - and say which one the argument in front of you needs. |
| What a Rate Corrects For [H] | Read the divisor of a rate, name what it holds constant, and name what it leaves untouched. |
| Where the Comparison Starts [H] | Ask which figure a change is measured from, and say how a different starting point would move the claim. |
| What an Average Hides [H] | Treat an average as one point inside a distribution, and say what a median, a spread or a share above a line would add to it. |
| When a Correlation Carries a Cause [H] | Separate a measured association from the causal sentence an argument wants it to support, and name the comparison that would settle it. |
| The Difference and the Error [H] | Weigh a reported difference against how far the measurement could move on its own, and say when a gap is too small for the method to see. |
| Carrying a Trend Forward [H] | Say what an "at this rate" sentence is assuming, and name a reason the measured rate might not hold. |
| Where the Breath Goes [H] | Break a forty-word sentence at its joints, so that no group of words arrives in pieces. |
| The Sentence That Has Not Finished Yet [H] | Keep the voice open through a sentence that stacks its conditions first and states its point last. |
| Holding the Sentence Across an Interruption [H] | Hold a sentence open across an aside, and come back to the main clause at exactly the level you left it. |
| What Each Mark Asks Your Voice For [H] | Give each mark on the page the pause and the pitch it actually asks for, instead of pausing the same way at all of them. |
| The Word the Sentence Turns On [H] | Put the stress on the one word the sentence before it did not already supply, and hear what that stress commits you to. |
| A Line Is Not the Sentence Inside It [H] | Read verse by the sentence and by the line at the same time, and hear what a poet gets out of the difference. |
| Making the Structure Audible [H] | Read a speech so that a listener can hear the shape the writer built into it. |
| The Tone the Paragraph Earns [H] | Decide how a line has to be read from what the paragraph around it has already put on the table. |
| What a Chapter Opening Takes for Granted [H] | Identify what a page of a novel expects the reader to already know, and say what the writing buys by refusing to explain it. |
| Scenes That Rhyme [H] | Read a scene against an earlier one it repeats, and state what the difference between them measures. |
| How Close the Telling Stands [H] | Track how far the narration is standing from a character, and say what a move nearer or further away is doing. |
| What the Second Story Says About the First [H] | Explain what a subplot contributes to the main story it never touches. |
| The Image That Comes Back [H] | Say what an object or image picks up by returning late in a book after being planted early. |
| Reading From Where You Stand [H] | Judge what a scene's placement in a long book does to what the scene means. |
| Where a Chapter Stops [H] | Explain what a chapter's chosen beginning and ending do, and what a break between chapters costs or buys. |
| The Person the Book Kept [H] | Say what a novel accomplishes by bringing back a character it introduced briefly and left alone for hundreds of pages. |
| Tracing a Rule Written in Prose [H] | Follow a decision rule stated in sentences and say what it does with a particular case, including the cases it settles quietly. |
| What the Trade Costs [H] | Name what an engineering choice buys, what it pays with, and which of the two the text has left unstated. |
| The Constraint That Rules It Out [H] | Find the stated limit that eliminates a candidate, and say why nothing the candidate is good at brings it back. |
| Requirement or Preference [H] | Tell a line that can disqualify a candidate from a line that can only rank the candidates left, and use each for what it can do. |
| What a Failure Analysis Establishes [H] | Separate what a failure investigation proved from what it merely failed to rule out, and tell a cause from a condition. |
| What a Part Promises [H] | Hold a component's promise to exactly what it covers, and name what it deliberately leaves to something else. |
| What Changes When It Gets Bigger [H] | Say which quantity is fixed, which grows, and how fast, when a described design is made larger or busier. |
| Which Number Was Measured [H] | Read a quoted figure for the quantity it measures and the conditions it was measured under, before reading it as a claim about performance. |
| Hearing Rhymes | Tell when two words end with the same sound. |
| Counting Syllables | Break a word into its beats. |
| Hearing the First Sound | Tell which sound a word starts with. |
| Hearing the Last Sound | Tell which sound a word ends with. |
| Hearing the Middle Vowel Sound | Find the vowel sound in the middle of a short word. |
| Blending Sounds into Words | Push separate sounds together to make a word. |
| Words That Begin Alike | Group words by their beginning sound. |
| Capital and Lowercase Letters | Match every capital letter to its lowercase partner. |
| Letter Sounds | Say the sound each letter stands for. |
| Short Vowel Sounds | Hear and write the five short vowel sounds. |
| Reading Short Words | Sound out and read consonant-vowel-consonant words. |
| Word Families | Read a whole set of words by learning one ending. |
| Recognizing High-Frequency Words | Know the most common words on sight, instantly. |
| High-Frequency Words in Sentences | Use common words correctly inside a real sentence. |
| How Books and Print Work | Know the parts of a book and which way print goes. |
| Listening Comprehension | Understand a story that is read out loud to you. |
| What Happened First, Next, Last | Put the events of a story in the order they happened. |
| What Makes a Sentence | Tell a complete sentence from a group of words. |
| Naming Part and Telling Part | Split a sentence into who it is about and what happens. |
| Capital Letters and End Marks | Start every sentence with a capital and end it with a mark. |
| Choosing the Right End Mark | Use a period, question mark, or exclamation point. |
| Capitalizing Names | Capitalize names, places, days, months, and the word I. |
| Finding the Base Word | Strip the extra parts off a word to find the word underneath. |
| What a Prefix Means | Know what the common prefixes do to a word. |
| Using a Prefix to Read a Word | Work out what a prefixed word means without being told. |
| What a Suffix Means | Know what the common suffixes add to a word. |
| Using a Suffix to Read a Word | Work out what a word with a suffix means. |
| Reading a Word You Have Never Seen | Work out an unfamiliar word from its prefix, base, and suffix. |
| Endings Change a Word's Job | See how a suffix turns one kind of word into another. |
| Choosing the Right Form | Pick the form of a word that a sentence actually needs. |
| What a Root Is | Find the root inside a long word and tell it from a base word. |
| What the Common Roots Mean | Know what the roots that build academic English actually mean. |
| Words That Share a Root | Sort words into families by the root they are built on. |
| Words Built from Two Roots | Read a word built out of two roots by putting both part meanings together, in order. |
| One Root, Many Prefixes | Use the prefix to tell apart words built on the same root. |
| Reading a Word You Have Never Met | Work out an unfamiliar word from its root and the sentence together. |
| When the Letters Lie | Test a root by meaning, not by letters, and catch the look-alikes. |
| Greek Spelling Clues | Spell the Greek words in science and math, and know why they look odd. |
| Words That Sound the Same | Recognize two words that share one sound and nothing else. |
| Choosing the Right Spelling | Use the meaning of a sentence to choose between two spellings. |
| its and it's, your and you're | Tell a contraction from a possessive using the long-form test. |
| When the Sentence Just Tells You | Find a word's meaning written into the sentence itself. |
| A Nearby Word That Means the Same | Use a synonym elsewhere in the passage to unlock a word. |
| When a Contrast Points the Other Way | Use a contrast word to work out the opposite meaning. |
| Working Back From Examples | Use a list of examples to work out the category. |
| When There Is No Clue Word | Work out a meaning from the whole situation. |
| Naming the Clue | Say which kind of context clue a sentence is using. |
| Putting Your Guess Back In | Check a guessed meaning by reading the sentence again with it. |
| Words With More Than One Meaning | Choose the meaning a sentence needs, not the one you thought of first. |
| When the Clue Is Somewhere Else | Find the meaning of a word when the clue sits in a different sentence. |
| Shades of Meaning | Choose the word whose size matches what actually happened. |
| Words That Carry a Feeling | Hear the approval or disapproval hidden inside a word choice. |
| Noticing When Words Are Not Literal | Tell when a sentence is not meant exactly as written. |
| Working Out What It Really Means | Say in plain words what a figure of speech is telling you. |
| Similes | Read a comparison made with like or as. |
| Metaphors | Read a comparison that says one thing IS another. |
| Personification | Spot something not human doing something only people do. |
| Idioms | Learn set phrases whose meaning the words do not give you. |
| Three Kinds of School Word | Sort a word into everyday, used in every subject, or belonging to one subject. |
| The Words Every Subject Uses | Give the exact meaning of the words that show up in every subject. |
| Who the Story Is About | Name the characters in a story and say what one of them is like. |
| How a Character Feels | Name a feeling a story shows through what a character does. |
| Who the Story Is About | Name the character a story follows. |
| First, Next, and Last | Say what happened first, what came in between, and what came last. |
| Putting the Whole Story in Order | Arrange all the events of a story from beginning to end. |
| Finding the Problem | Name what goes wrong in a story. |
| Finding the Solution | Say how a story's problem gets resolved. |
| Summarizing a Story | Retell a story keeping only what matters. |
| Knowing What to Leave Out | Spot the detail a summary does not need. |
| Beginning, Middle, End | Say which part of a story an event belongs to, and what that part is for. |
| What a Character Wants, and What Is in the Way | Name both halves of a story problem: the want and the thing blocking it. |
| The Tries That Do Not Work | Follow the middle of a story as a run of attempts, and say why each fails. |
| The Moment It Turns | Find the one moment after which a story cannot go back. |
| Because of That, Not And Then | Follow a plot as a chain of causes instead of a list of events. |
| Topic or Theme? | Tell the subject of a story apart from what the story says about it. |
| What a Character Learns | Find the theme by watching what a character understands at the end that they did not understand at the start. |
| The Moral a Story States | Read a stated moral or saying and check what the story actually backs up. |
| Saying a Theme in One Sentence | Word a theme so it is neither about one character nor true of every story. |
| The Evidence for a Theme | Point to the detail that actually supports a theme, not just a true detail. |
| Themes Nobody Writes Down | Work out a theme from an ending, a silence, or a word the writer chose. |
| Objects That Carry the Message | Read the object or image a story keeps returning to. |
| What a Story Does Not Say | Refuse a lesson the text will not support, including the tidy one. |
| Who Is Telling This | Find the teller of a text before deciding what the text means. |
| How Much the Teller Knows | Work out how far a teller can see, and what is therefore missing. |
| What the Teller Cannot See | Assemble what a text shows but its teller has not noticed. |
| What a Person Makes of It | Separate what happened from what a person in the text made of it. |
| Words That Give a View Away | Notice the single words that carry a teller's attitude. |
| One Event, Two Views | Explain why two honest accounts of one event can disagree. |
| Telling It From Somewhere Else | Predict what changes when the same events get a different teller. |
| Why the Author Chose This Teller | Explain what a writer gains and loses by choosing a particular teller. |
| Lines, Stanzas and Where a Poem Breaks | Read a poem's shape on the page as part of what it means. |
| Rhyme, Rhyme Scheme and Poems Without Either | Hear rhyme, name the pattern it makes, and read a poem that has none. |
| Repetition, Alliteration and the Sound of a Line | Notice what a poem's sounds are doing besides rhyming. |
| The Picture a Poem Puts in Your Head | Read the sensory pictures a poem or a stage sets, and say what they do. |
| Figures of Speech Inside a Poem | Read similes, metaphors and personification where poems pack them tightest. |
| Who Is Talking in a Poem | Identify the voice speaking a poem, and what that voice reveals. |
| How a Play Is Written Down | Read a script: cast list, scene heading, dialogue and stage directions. |
| Reading What a Scene Is Really Doing | Work out what characters want, what blocks them, and what they will not say. |
| Comparing on the Same Point | Name one point that both texts speak to before you say anything about either of them. |
| Two Characters, Side by Side | Compare two characters by what each one decides, not by what each one is called. |
| Patterns of Events Across Stories | Recognize the shape two stories share, and find the exact place where they stop sharing it. |
| Same Idea, Different Story | State what each text says about a shared subject, then compare the two statements. |
| Two Tellers of One Event | Compare who is telling each text and what that teller was in a position to know. |
| The Same Story in Another Form | Compare what a poem, a play, a story or an explanation can and cannot carry. |
| Topic or Main Idea? | Tell what a text is about from what it says about it. |
| Finding the Main Idea | Say in one sentence what a whole text is telling you. |
| Main Ideas That Are Not Written Down | Work out the main idea when no sentence states it. |
| Details That Back It Up | Find the fact in a text that supports a particular idea. |
| Writing a Summary | Retell a text keeping only what matters. |
| Telling a Detail from the Main Idea | Spot the sentence that is only a detail. |
| What a Heading Promises | Use a title or a heading to say what a part of a page will be about. |
| Words That Give the Shape Away | Spot the words and sentences that tell you how a nonfiction text is organized. |
| Description: Groups, Parts and Kinds | Recognize a text that describes one thing closely or sorts things into kinds. |
| Sequence: Time Order and Steps | Follow a text built on the order things happen or the order they are done. |
| Compare and Contrast | Read a text that sets two things side by side and says how they are alike and different. |
| Cause and Effect | Trace a text where each thing described makes the next thing happen. |
| Problem and Solution | Read a text that states a difficulty and then what was done about it. |
| Naming the Structure of a Whole Text | Decide which structure a whole passage is built on, and notice when it uses more than one. |
| Why the Writer Chose That Shape | Explain what a text's structure does for the reader, and what would be lost in another shape. |
| Why the Author Wrote It | Name what a text was built to do, not just what it is about. |
| The Evidence for a Purpose | Point to the move in the text that proves what the writer wanted. |
| Why This Part Is Here | Explain the job a single paragraph, sentence or phrase is doing. |
| Who It Was Written For | Work out the reader a text was aimed at, and how you can tell. |
| The Author's Point of View | Say what the writer thinks about the subject, even when no opinion is stated. |
| Words That Take a Side | Notice how a writer's wording steers what a reader concludes. |
| Facts, Judgments, and Honest Uncertainty | Sort what can be checked from what is argued, and spot a writer naming their own limits. |
| Two Writers, One Subject | Compare two texts on one subject and find the exact point where they part. |
| Stated or Implied? | Tell what a text says outright from what it only lets you conclude. |
| What One Detail Tells You | Draw the conclusion a single detail supports, and stop there. |
| The Line That Proves It | Given a claim, find the sentence in the text that actually supports it. |
| Putting Two Details Together | Reach a conclusion that no single sentence in the text states. |
| An Objective Summary | Say what a text argued, in its own terms, without taking a side. |
| Which Evidence Is Strongest | Choose between two relevant details by asking which one settles it. |
| Inference or Guess? | Spot the step that goes past what the text can carry. |
| What Your Sources Are Really About | State the one question a set of sources is answering, precisely enough to compare them. |
| Where Sources Agree | Find the ground two sources share before you look at where they split. |
| Where Sources Disagree | Locate the exact sentence where two sources stop agreeing. |
| A Fact Fight or a Meaning Fight | Tell whether two sources disagree about what happened or about what it means. |
| What Each Source Chose to Include | Notice what one source puts first, and what another leaves out entirely. |
| Choosing the Source That Can Answer It | Match a question to the source that is actually able to answer it. |
| Building One Answer from Several Sources | Write one sentence that holds everything the sources support and nothing more. |
| What None of the Sources Tells You | Name the question your sources leave open, and what would answer it. |
| The Main Idea of a Science Text | Find what a science passage is really explaining. |
| Science Words Defined in Place | Work out a technical word from the sentence that introduces it. |
| Following a Process in Order | Track the steps of a life cycle or a process. |
| Cause and Effect in Science | Say why something happens, using the text. |
| Finding the Evidence | Point to the sentence that proves a claim. |
| Words Earth Science Redefines | Read an earth science term for its exact meaning, not its everyday one. |
| Loops, Not Lines | Follow a cause around a loop instead of straight down a list. |
| What Can and Cannot Be Predicted | Tell a real prediction from a question no method can answer. |
| How We Know What Nobody Watched | Name the measurement that supports a claim about something nobody saw happen. |
| Physical Science Words, Defined in Place | Work out a physical science term from the sentence that introduces it. |
| The Point of a Physical Science Text | Find the mechanism a physical science passage is really explaining. |
| Running the Mechanism Forward | Say why something physical happens, and follow the chain past one step. |
| Reading the Measurements | Read numbers in a science passage for size, unit and what they compare. |
| Which Sentence Actually Proves It | Point to the detail in a science text that settles a particular claim. |
| Reading a Fair Test | Find what an investigation changed and what it deliberately held still. |
| The Main Idea of a History Text | Find what a history passage is really about. |
| Causes and Consequences | Explain why something happened, and what it led to. |
| Evidence in a History Text | Point to the detail that actually proves a claim. |
| Whose Story Is Being Told | Notice whose point of view a history text takes, and who is missing. |
| What the History Actually Says | Use what the passage taught you to answer a real history question. |
| Reading a Source Like a Historian | Ask who made a source, when, and what they wanted it to do. |
| Claims and the Evidence Under Them | Separate what a history text asserts from what it shows. |
| When Sources Disagree | Compare accounts of the same event instead of trusting one. |
| Civics Words With Exact Jobs | Work out what a government word means from the sentence around it. |
| Who Holds Which Power | Sort any government action by which job it is and at which level. |
| Steps, and Where They Stop | Follow a civic process in order and find the points where it can end. |
| What a Noun Is | Name the words that stand for a person, place, or thing. |
| Common Nouns and Proper Nouns | Tell a general noun from the name of one particular thing. |
| What a Verb Is | Name the words that tell what someone does. |
| Finding the Verb in a Sentence | Pick out the verb inside a whole sentence. |
| Making the Verb Match | Choose a verb form that matches one thing or many things. |
| Finding Both Parts | Pick out the noun and the verb in the same sentence. |
| What an Adjective Is | Name the words that tell what a noun is like. |
| Which Noun the Adjective Describes | Match an adjective to the one noun it is telling you about. |
| What an Adverb Is | Name the words that tell more about what happened. |
| Spotting a Fragment | Tell when a group of words stops before it is a sentence. |
| Spotting a Run-On | Notice when two sentences have been jammed into one. |
| Three Ways to Fix a Run-On | Repair a run-on, and choose the repair that fits the meaning. |
| Joining Two Sentences | Combine short sentences with the joining word the meaning needs. |
| Sentence, Fragment, or Run-On? | Sort any group of words into complete, too short, or too long. |
| Past, Present, or Future? | Tell from the verb whether a sentence is about the past, the present, or the future. |
| Building the Past Tense with -ed | Add -ed to a verb and make the spelling changes the ending forces. |
| Verbs That Do Not Take -ed | Use the past tense of the irregular verbs, and keep it apart from the participle. |
| Actions Caught in the Middle | Use am, is, are, was, were and will be with an -ing verb to show an action in progress. |
| Have, Has and Had | Use have, has and had with a past participle, and say what had adds. |
| Keeping the Tense Steady | Notice a sentence that slips into a different tense and put it back. |
| Making the Verb Match Its Subject | Match a present-tense verb, including am, is and are, to its subject. |
| Subjects That Trick You | Find the real subject when a phrase, a group word or a There sentence hides it. |
| Commas in a List | Separate three or more items in a sentence with commas. |
| The Comma After an Opener | Close off a word or phrase that comes before the main sentence. |
| Commas Around the Person You Are Talking To | Set off the name of the person being spoken to. |
| Quotation Marks Around What Someone Says | Punctuate a spoken line and the words that tell who said it. |
| Apostrophes in Contractions | Put the apostrophe exactly where the missing letters were. |
| Apostrophes That Show Ownership | Show who owns something with 's or s'. |
| its, it's, and the Plural That Needs No Apostrophe | Choose between look-alike words that an apostrophe tells apart. |
| Clause, or Just a Phrase? | Tell an independent clause, a dependent clause, and a phrase apart. |
| Prepositions and the Phrases They Start | Find a prepositional phrase and say where it starts and stops. |
| All Seven Coordinating Conjunctions | Choose among the seven - and, but, or, so, for, nor, and yet - by what each one claims. |
| The Comma Before a Joining Word | When a joining word holds two halves together, the comma goes in only if a whole sentence follows it. |
| Subordinating Conjunctions | Use because, although, unless, until, and their kin to say how two ideas relate. |
| Where the Comma Goes in a Complex Sentence | Comma after a leading dependent clause, none after a trailing one. |
| Conjunctions That Come in Pairs | Use both...and, either...or, neither...nor, and not only...but also, with matching halves. |
| Simple, Compound, Complex | Name the structure of any sentence by counting its clauses. |
| Knowing When You Have a Sentence | Tell a finished sentence from a piece of one. |
| Saying More Than the Bare Fact | Add detail that answers a question a reader would ask. |
| Verbs That Do the Work | Choose a verb precise enough to replace a description. |
| Naming the Thing Exactly | Replace a category word with the actual thing. |
| Joining Two Sentences | Put two related sentences together without making a run-on. |
| Choosing the Right Joining Word | Pick the joining word that states the real relationship. |
| Changing How a Sentence Starts | Notice a repeated opening and rewrite one to break it. |
| The Sentence the Others Are About | Find or choose the sentence a paragraph is built on. |
| Details That Actually Support | Choose detail that backs the claim you made. |
| A Claim or a Fact? | Tell a position someone could argue with from a fact they could check. |
| The Reason Under a Claim | Find the sentence that says why a position holds. |
| A Reason That Just Says It Again | Spot a reason that goes in a circle instead of forward. |
| Evidence That Actually Proves It | Tell measured evidence from a stronger way of repeating an opinion. |
| Claims You Cannot Defend | Recognize a claim pushed past what any evidence could support. |
| Answering the Other Side | Answer the strongest objection instead of talking past it. |
| The Shape of an Argument | Name the job each sentence in an argument is doing. |
| Explaining or Arguing? | Tell a sentence that explains from one that argues, tells a story, or gives orders. |
| Saying What You Will Explain | Open a report with a sentence that says what about the subject will be explained. |
| Putting Facts Where They Belong | Group related facts under the heading that answers the same question. |
| Sentences That Add Something | Develop a point with real information instead of repeating it louder. |
| Defining a Word for Your Reader | Write a definition that names the kind of thing and what sets it apart. |
| Sounding Like a Report | Keep the writer, the reader, and casual talk out of an explanation. |
| Your Own Words, the Same Facts | Restate a source's fact in your own wording without changing it. |
| Starting Where the Story Starts | Begin a story inside the moment instead of outside it. |
| Telling It in an Order a Reader Can Follow | Keep events in order and mark the jumps with real time signposts. |
| Showing a Feeling Instead of Naming It | Replace a named feeling with something a reader can watch. |
| The Detail That Earns Its Place | Choose details that do a job instead of filling space. |
| Dialogue That Does a Job | Keep the lines that change something and cut the ones that do not. |
| Slowing Down the Part That Matters | Spend sentences in proportion to what a moment is worth. |
| Revising and Editing Are Different Jobs | Tell a change that fixes what a piece says from one that fixes how it is written. |
| Cutting Words That Do No Work | Cut the words that repeat something the sentence has already said. |
| Pronouns That Point at Nothing | Find a pronoun a reader cannot trace back and rewrite it so they can. |
| What a Spellchecker Cannot Catch | Catch a correctly spelled word that is the wrong word. |
| A Question Worth Researching | Turn a subject into a question that sources can actually settle. |
| Does This Source Answer My Question? | Tell a source that answers your question from one that merely shares it. |
| Who Wrote It, and Why | Weigh a source by its author, its date and its purpose. |
| Notes in Your Own Words | Take a note that carries the idea without carrying the sentence. |
| Naming Where It Came From | Record a source completely enough that a reader could find it. |
| What the End Mark Tells Your Voice | Read a line the way its end mark says to read it. |
| Reading in Groups, Not One Word at a Time | Group the words in a line the way they belong before you read it aloud. |
| The Word You Lean On | Choose which word to stress, and know what stressing it tells a listener. |
| The One Thing It Is All Serving | State the idea a whole text is built to serve when it is never printed, and write a summary that carries the point instead of the best detail. |
| The Line You Would Put Your Finger On | Pick the one detail that settles a particular claim, and say why the other true details do not reach it. |
| What the Text Made True Without Printing It | Build an answer the writer never wrote, from clues on the page plus what you know, and stop exactly where the clues stop. |
| The Shape, and the Job of One Part | Name how a text is built, and explain what one paragraph, line or stage direction is doing in the place where it sits. |
| What You Know That They Do Not | Track the gap between what you have been told and what a person inside the text knows, in stories and in true accounts alike. |
| How Far the Evidence Actually Reaches | Separate a claim from its reasons and evidence, judge whether the evidence reaches as far as the claim goes, and spot a piece that does not belong at all. |
| Which Groups of Words Can Stand Alone | Tell a phrase from a clause, and a clause that stands alone from one that cannot. |
| What a Phrase Is Doing in the Sentence | Say which word a prepositional phrase goes with and what it tells you about it. |
| The Words That Rename a Noun | Find the noun group that renames the noun beside it, and read what its commas mean. |
| Commas That Change Who Is Meant | Read a pair of commas as the signal that a clause is extra rather than necessary. |
| The Word Pairs That Slip Through | Choose between look-alike words using the sentence around them rather than a memorized rhyme. |