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ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Text Structure

Analyzing the Overall Structure of a Passage

Overall structure is the shape a passage's ideas make as they build, like problem-then-solution or myth-then-correction, not just the order its topics appear in.

Watch it drawn5 questionsPractice

A passage is not a bag of facts in sequence. Each paragraph does a job for the one before it: it sets up, complicates, answers, or reveals. Reading for structure means asking, as you move through the text, what this paragraph is doing to the last one. A paragraph that lists symptoms is description. A paragraph that then explains why those symptoms happened turns the first into a problem and itself into a cause or a solution. That relationship, not the subject matter, is the structure.

You build this outline as you go, because you cannot know the shape of the whole thing from the first paragraph alone. A passage that opens with a claim might be about to refute it. One that opens with description might be withholding its point until the last line. So treat each new paragraph as a test of your current guess: does it keep building the same shape, or does it bend the passage into something else, like a correction, a rescue, or a reveal.

This connects directly to the questions nearby about purpose and relationships between parts, since structure is really that question asked about the whole passage instead of one sentence. It also protects you from a common trap in passages about arrangement or chronology: dates and topics can appear in order without the passage being organized by time at all. The real shape is whatever job the paragraphs are doing for each other, and that is what a structure question is actually asking you to name.

Key terms

overall structure
the relationship between a passage's parts, such as problem-solution or claim-refutation, not just the order topics appear in.
chronological structure
a structure organized by time, where later paragraphs describe later events in sequence.
problem-and-solution structure
a structure where one part presents a difficulty and another part presents how it was addressed.
withheld purpose
when a passage reads as plain description until a late paragraph reveals what the description was building toward.

Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow does an outline build block by block as 750 words scroll past?
  2. How it worksHow do you tell a chronological structure from a problem-and-solution one in two paragraphs?
  3. Worked exampleShow me the shape of a text that opens with a myth, dismantles it, then rebuilds a version of it.
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't the structure of a text the same as the order of its topics?
  5. Going furtherWhat happens to overall structure when a highly complex text withholds its purpose until the end?

Check yourself

Your turneasy1 of 3
Informational passage: Everyone knows the Vikings wore horned helmets. They did not: of the 12 helmets recovered from graves of the period, none has horns, and the image traces to an opera production of 1883. But the costume designer did not invent the horns. He took them from Bronze Age helmets found in Denmark, 17 centuries older than any Viking, which do have horns and were probably ceremonial. Two of them survive and are kept in Copenhagen. The popular picture is wrong about the century and right about the country, which is a better record than most inventions manage. The passage is structured as:

End of topic.

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