SAT — craft and structure in literature

Literature is one of the four subject areas from which the digital SAT draws its short Reading and Writing passages, and literary excerpts call for a particular kind of reading. A word in a novel written a century ago may carry an older meaning than the one you use every day; a poem's last lines may complete a comparison that began at the top; a stage direction in a play may say more than any line of dialogue. The Craft and Structure questions on such passages ask what a word means as it is used, and what a line, sentence or phrase does in the text as a whole.

This material gathers twelve such questions, each built on an excerpt quoted in full from American works published before 1931. Five are words-in-context items in which the everyday sense of the word is the trap: "speculation" in Kate Chopin's "A Pair of Silk Stockings," "industries" in an Emily Dickinson poem about the morning after a death, "abroad" in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, "plastic" in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and "effaced" in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Seven are function items: the ending of Dickinson's poem about a railway train, the question at the center of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask," an ironic phrase in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and the image of a bracelet in The House of Mirth, a silent stage direction in Susan Glaspell's Trifles, the opening meditation of Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars and the turn at the end of Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."

No prior knowledge of the works is needed. A sentence of context introduces each excerpt, and every answer can be justified from the words on the screen. The explanations point to those words and say why each wrong choice fails, whether it takes a word in its modern sense, reads a figure of speech literally or gives a line a job that belongs to another part of the text.

The flashcards collect the reading moves behind the questions: using neighboring words to fix a meaning, spotting an older sense of a familiar word, following an extended comparison, finding the turn in a poem, reading stage directions and irony. The material offers a quiz and a flashcard deck. Practice material written by Zestly for students preparing for the SAT; it is not produced or endorsed by the College Board.

• Determine the meaning of a word as it is used in a literary excerpt, including older or less common senses
• Describe the function of a line, sentence, phrase or stage direction within a poem, story, novel or play
• Follow an extended comparison and a turn in a poem
• Recognize irony and figurative language in a narrator's description
• Support each answer with specific words from the excerpt

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the Craft and Structure domain of the digital SAT Reading and Writing section as described on satsuite.collegeboard.org (page consulted September 2026). Excerpts from works published in the US before 1931 (public domain): Kate Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings" (1897); Emily Dickinson, Poems (1890, 1891); Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913); Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920); Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895); Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896); Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905); Susan Glaspell, Trifles (1916, published in Plays, 1920); Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900); Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" (1865).