SAT® · Reading and Writing: Craft and Structure
Answers That Get the Content Right and the Function Wrong
A purpose or function answer can describe the text's content with total accuracy and still be wrong, because it misses the job that content is doing. Check the verb before you check the noun.
Purpose and function questions ask what a sentence, paragraph, or passage is doing, not just what it says. Every answer choice has two parts: a verb that names the move (reports, narrows, objects, undercuts, illustrates) and a noun phrase that names the content the move is made on (an experiment, a reading of a treaty, a theory). A choice can get the noun exactly right and still fail if the verb names the wrong move, or get the verb right and fail on the noun. Test them separately. Ask first: does this verb match what the text is actually doing to its material? Then ask: does the noun match which material it's doing that to?
This is why a choice like 'it describes an experiment' usually loses to a longer one. Describing is true but empty: almost any experimental text could be described that way, so it fails to say what the description was for. A text about ants and feeders isn't just reporting an experiment, it's reporting an experiment in order to settle a question, and the purpose answer has to name that settling. Likewise, a choice that lists every detail in the passage isn't automatically better than one that mentions almost none of them. A function answer isn't graded on coverage. It's graded on whether its verb and noun together match the one job the sentence is doing, even if that means naming only a fraction of the content.
The sharpest version of this trap shows up with two texts or two voices. Two choices can use the identical verb, say 'objects to' or 'gives reasoning for,' and differ only in whose objection or whose reasoning is meant. Getting the move right but assigning it to the wrong person is as wrong as getting the move itself wrong, so the last check is always: whose view is this?
Key terms
- Purpose question
- A question asking why an author wrote a passage or included a detail, not what the detail states.
- Function question
- A question asking what job a specific sentence or paragraph performs within the larger text.
- Verb versus noun test
- Checking whether an answer choice's action word matches the text's move, separately from whether its subject matches the text's content.
- Content trap
- A wrong answer that accurately restates what the text says while misdescribing what that statement is doing.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do you test an answer choice's verb separately from its noun before you accept the whole thing?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't 'it describes an experiment' a good purpose answer for a text that describes an experiment?
- Common mistakeWhy doesn't an answer choice that mentions every detail beat one that mentions almost none of them?
- Going furtherWhat happens when two choices name the same function but disagree about whose view is being described?
Check yourself
End of topic.