ACT Reading — humanities, and the attitude a writer never states

Humanities passages on ACT Reading are written by people with opinions, and the questions are mostly about opinions that are never stated. A critic rarely writes "I disliked the building". He writes that its angles cut into the skyline like a jagged blade, that it demands submission from the streets around it, that walking past it feels like passing a predator. The attitude is in the adjectives, and reading it there is the skill this material trains.

Ten questions on four invented pieces of criticism: a library that intimidates its neighborhood, a theater company that has given up on dialogue, a painter who cannot bear an empty inch of canvas, and a park too well kept to be used. Each question quotes its passage in full, and no passage carries more than three questions.

Two questions ask for the writer's attitude, and in each the evidence is a list of word choices rather than any statement of feeling. One of them turns on a phrase that looks like praise and is not: a triumph of aggressive geometry is a sentence turning on itself in its fourth word. Two ask what the writer is chiefly arguing, where the wrong options are usually the view the writer quotes in order to reject it. Two ask what the text states, with every wrong option built from real material moved to the wrong person — the lack of discipline that belongs to the critic and not to the critics he is answering.

Two ask what a sentence is doing. Both can be answered from the sentences on either side rather than by intuition: a memory introduced by "I recall a time when" and followed by "Now" is a measurement, and a detail sitting between a general claim and the line that draws its moral is the evidence for that claim.

The last two are vocabulary in context, built as such questions should be. All four options are genuine meanings of the word, and only the sentence decides. A silence can be heavy, but not in the sense in which a suitcase is heavy, or rain is heavy, or a sluggish man is heavy. A canvas can be let to breathe, but not in the sense in which lungs breathe, or in which someone breathes a word, or in which a runner takes a breather. Knowing the word is not enough — you have to ask what the word is attached to.

Twelve flashcards carry the method, including the one that saves the most marks: when a passage is full of adjectives, "the writer is neutral" is almost never the answer.

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• Read a writer's attitude from word choice when no sentence states an opinion
• Recognize a phrase that looks like praise and is not
• Tell the writer's own claim from a view the writer quotes in order to reject it
• Spot a wrong option built from real material attached to the wrong person
• Say what a memory or an anecdote is doing, using the sentences on either side of it
• Choose among four genuine meanings of a word by asking what the word is attached to
• Reject 'the writer is neutral' when the page is full of loaded adjectives

Written for the humanities strand of ACT Reading, following the skills the test's own published description names: determining central ideas, understanding the function of a portion of the text, interpreting words and phrases in context, and analyzing an author's point of view and purpose. Every essay here is original prose written for this material; every building, performance, painter, park and town in it is invented, and no real writer, artist, musician, work or institution is named. Nothing is taken from any ACT publication or released test, and each passage is quoted in full inside its own question.