EN7 Topic Development & Purpose

Lesson

A handful of English questions are not about the sentence in front of you at all. They ask what a sentence is doing in the essay: whether to add it, whether to cut it, what would be lost without it, which version accomplishes a stated job. ACT calls this Topic Development, and it is where careful readers give away points — because they answer the question they expect instead of the question on the page.

"Should the writer make this addition?"

Four choices: two begin Yes, two begin No. Students pick the reason that sounds agreeable. Do this instead:

• Decide yes or no first, before you read any reason. Ask one question: does this sentence serve the point this paragraph is making? If the paragraph is about a permit process, a fact about soil chemistry belongs only if the paragraph needs it to make sense.
• Then test the two reasons on your side. Half of them are false statements about the essay — "because it introduces the paragraph's main idea" when the main idea was stated three sentences ago, or "because it repeats information given earlier" when nothing earlier said it. A reason that misdescribes the passage kills the choice, even if you agree with the yes or the no.

Nearly every wrong choice on these items is wrong in its reason, not in its verdict. That is where you should be spending your attention.

"The essay would primarily lose…"

Cover the choices. Read the sentence in question and ask what it supplies that no other sentence supplies: a specific example, a date, a comparison, a cause, a detail that makes a later pronoun make sense. Then find the choice that names that. Watch for two traps: choices that describe something the sentence mentions rather than what it contributes, and choices that credit the sentence with an opinion when the sentence states a fact.

Goal questions: the stem is the whole item

"Which choice most effectively concludes the paragraph by returning to the comparison in the opening sentence?" That underlined half is not decoration. Three of the four choices will be reasonable sentences; often all four will be true. Only one will do the named job.

Relevance

ACT plants sentences that are accurate, nicely written and off the point — a fact about a tree species in a paragraph about permits, a bit of biography in a paragraph about a machine. When a question asks which sentence is least relevant, or whether a sentence should be kept, ask what the paragraph is arguing and whether the sentence advances it. If deleting the sentence costs the paragraph nothing, that is your answer.

Be careful in the other direction too. A sentence can look like a digression and still be load-bearing: if a later sentence says "that reading" or "those two companies," the sentence that supplies the reading or names the companies has to stay.

Whole-essay questions

The last question in a passage is often: "Suppose the writer's goal had been to write an essay that ______. Would this essay accomplish that goal?" Again two Yes choices and two No choices.

• Judge the whole essay, not the last paragraph. Ask what the essay is mostly about, in one sentence.
• Compare that to the goal. A goal the essay touches once is not a goal the essay accomplishes.
• Then check the reason for factual accuracy: choices that say "the essay never mentions X" are frequently false, and choices that say "the essay explains how X works" are frequently false in the other direction — mentioning is not explaining.

These items are slow, and they are meant to be. They are also the items where a student who reads the stem twice beats a student who reads the passage twice.