ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Text Structure

A Sentence's Function When It Is Stated

Some sentences announce their own job with a signal phrase. For example promises an instance, in fairness promises a concession, so the test question is really asking you to name that job.

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The exam often asks what a sentence is doing, not what it says, because a passage is built out of moves: claim, instance, concession, qualification, consequence. Knowing the content of a sentence tells you a fact. Knowing its function tells you how that fact is being used, and that's what connects one sentence to the next. A sentence can be stuffed with vivid detail and still have a plain job: back up the sentence before it, or complicate it, or narrow it.

Signal phrases are the easiest version of this because they announce the job before the sentence does it. For example and one striking illustration both promise a specific case of a general claim already made. In fairness promises a concession, a point granted to the other side, and you have to keep reading to see what the paragraph does with that concession: sometimes it uses the concession to soften its argument, sometimes it grants it and then overrides it anyway. The phrase sets up an expectation; the job is to notice whether the rest of the sentence or paragraph fulfills that expectation or bends it.

This is the simplest layer of the structure unit because the signal is explicit. The next layer asks you to find a sentence's function when there's no such phrase at all, and the layer after that asks about a whole paragraph's job in the passage. Getting comfortable naming the job here, out loud, in your own words, is what makes those harder versions manageable.

Key terms

function: The job a sentence does in a paragraph, such as illustrating, conceding, or qualifying a claim.
signal phrase: A word or phrase like for example or in fairness that announces a sentence's job in advance.
concession: A point granted to an opposing view, often introduced by phrases like in fairness or admittedly.
claim: The general statement a passage makes, which later sentences may support, limit, or complicate.

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Informational passage: A species introduced to an island often loses the traits it kept on the mainland. Colour, size and wariness all drift, and flight goes first wherever the island holds no predator. For example, the flightless rail of Inaccessible Island weighs 51 grams and has wings 7 centimetres long, having descended from birds that crossed 2898 kilometres of open sea to get there. Wings are expensive to build and to carry, and where nothing hunts on the ground the expense buys nothing. The same pattern turns up in 11 other island bird lineages that have been sequenced. The sentence beginning For example primarily functions to:

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