ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Word Meanings and Word Choice
Texts Dense With Difficult Language
Some passages bury one plain idea under archaic words and long nested clauses. The fix is to strip the sentence to its subject and main verb, and to track any extended metaphor as one image carried through several sentences.
A 19th-century essay often feels harder than a modern piece on the same subject even though it has no extra ideas in it. The difficulty is almost entirely in the packaging: old-fashioned diction (obtained, whereof, contended otherwise), inverted word order, and sentences that pile clause upon clause before ever reaching the verb. None of that adds meaning. It just adds distance between you and the one claim the writer is making. Your job is to see through the costume to the plain sentence underneath.
The method is mechanical. Find the main subject and the main verb first, and treat everything else as decoration until you need it. A sentence like 'That the manufactory... should within a decade have stood idle... was a circumstance which the gentlemen... had by no means foreseen' looks enormous, but its skeleton is just 'a circumstance had not been foreseen.' Numbers, dates, and side clauses about feet of waterfall or looms are details to check only if a question asks about them directly.
Figurative language gets the same treatment, but stretched. When a metaphor runs for a whole paragraph instead of a single line, every detail in that paragraph is doing the same symbolic job. A constitution called a vessel will keep being a vessel: it carries a burden, answers the helm, and its timbers may work loose in a swell. Read the first metaphor, name what it stands for, and then every later image slots into that same comparison without needing to be solved again. This skill sits right next to tone and connotation questions, since stripping clutter is what lets you hear the writer's attitude clearly.
Key terms
- Main clause
- The core subject-and-verb unit of a sentence that carries its basic claim, independent of any modifying clauses.
- Archaic diction
- Old-fashioned word choices, like 'whereof' or 'obtained,' that make a sentence feel harder without changing its meaning.
- Extended metaphor
- A single comparison that continues across multiple sentences or a whole paragraph, with each new detail mapping onto the same two things.
- Nested clauses
- Clauses embedded inside other clauses, delaying the sentence's main subject or verb.
- Concession
- A point a writer admits or allows even while arguing for a different main claim.
Watch it explained
Check yourself
End of topic.