Skill 2.B Questions: Revising for a Stated Audience and Purpose

The stem hands you the writer's goal instead of hiding it because this skill isn't testing whether you can guess intent. It's testing whether you can apply a given intent consistently. Once you know the audience is skeptical, or budget-conscious, or needs a concession, that goal becomes the one rule every answer choice has to satisfy. Your job shrinks to checking which option actually does the job named in the stem.

To turn a goal into a test, restate it as a condition an option must meet. 'Appeal to skeptical readers' becomes: does this sentence give skeptics a reason to trust the claim, usually by admitting a limit or showing evidence rather than just asserting harder. 'Concede a point without abandoning the argument' becomes: does the sentence name the objection and then still hold the original position. Read each option against that condition and eliminate any that fail it, no matter how well-written they are otherwise. For a concession case, a sentence describing a child unable to borrow a book for months is vivid, but it doesn't concede anything or answer an objection, so it fails the stated purpose even though it's the most emotionally striking choice.

This pairs with Skill 2.A, which asks you to identify rhetorical choices already in a passage, while 2.B asks you to produce or select one that fits a specified goal. Both skills reward reading the stem as closely as the passage, since the stem often contains the only information you need to eliminate three of four options immediately.