65 core topics + 106 prerequisite topics taught as needed · approximately 54 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Hearing Rhymes | Tell when two words end with the same sound. |
| Hearing the First Sound | Tell which sound a word starts with. |
| Words That Begin Alike | Group words by their beginning sound. |
| Capital and Lowercase Letters | Match every capital letter to its lowercase partner. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Idioms | Learn set phrases whose meaning the words do not give you. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Why the Author Wrote It | Name what a text was built to do, not just what it is about. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The Main Idea of a History Text | Find what a history passage is really about. |
| 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. |
| Reading a Source Like a Historian | Ask who made a source, when, and what they wanted it to do. |
| When Sources Disagree | Compare accounts of the same event instead of trusting one. |
| What a Noun Is | Name the words that stand for a person, place, or 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. |
| Finding Both Parts | Pick out the noun and the verb in the same sentence. |
| 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. |
| Clause, or Just a Phrase? | Tell an independent clause, a dependent clause, and a phrase apart. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |