Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Craft and Structure: Craft 1 — words in context, purpose and two texts.
← SAT
Words in context, text structure and purpose, and connections between two related texts — ≈28% of the Reading and Writing section, 13 to 15 questions, and the largest domain in it.
Words in context. A blank in a short passage, and four words. This is the closest thing the digital SAT has to a vocabulary question, and it is not a vocabulary question in the old sense: the words are ordinary ones, and what is being tested is whether the sentence around the blank tells you which of four near-synonyms fits. Mitigate, alleviate, diminish and curtail can all mean "make less" and only one of them will be right for what this sentence is doing.
Text structure and purpose. What is the function of the underlined sentence, or of the passage as a whole? Answers are about the job a piece of text is doing — introducing a complication, conceding a point, providing an example, qualifying a claim already made — not about what it is about.
Cross-text connections. Two short passages on the same topic, usually disagreeing. What would the author of Text 2 most likely say about the claim in Text 1? The answer turns on locating the exact point of disagreement, which is almost never the whole topic and almost always one specific step.
Words in context is the one place in the Reading and Writing section where a list of words actually helps, and the flashcards here are built for it: the high-utility academic words the SAT keeps returning to, with the distinction that separates each from its nearest neighbour. Knowing that undermine attacks a foundation while refute answers an argument is exactly the kind of thing a question can turn on.
Text structure and purpose rewards a different habit: reading a sentence for what it does rather than what it says. That is a skill you can practise deliberately, on anything you read, and most students never have.
The two texts usually agree about more than they disagree about. A wrong choice will take something both authors accept and present it as the disagreement, or will make Text 2's author reject Text 1 wholesale when they in fact object to one inference. Find the sentence in Text 2 that could not have been written by the author of Text 1, and the answer is about that sentence.
