Text Structures
A text that explains why something happened (like a wildfire) and the results of it (like loss of habitat) uses this structure.
What is cause and effect?
The text under a photograph or chart that explains what it is showing.
What is a caption?
A statement that can be proven true or false with objective evidence.
What is a fact?
A strong, one-sided preference that unfairly favors one person or idea over another.
What is bias?
The single sentence that best expresses what an article is mostly about.
What is the main idea (or central idea)?
This structure shows how two or more things are alike and different, using keywords like "similarly," "both," and "on the other hand."
What is compare and contrast?
An alphabetical list of important words and their definitions, usually found in the back of a textbook.
What is a glossary?
This type of fact is expressed in numbers, like "82% of users" or "a $1.5 million budget."
What is a statistic?
An author's attitude toward a subject (like "critical," "supportive," or "neutral"), which can reveal their bias.
What is the author's tone?
Facts, statistics, examples, and expert opinions that are used to support the main idea.
What are supporting details?
This structure identifies an issue, like plastic in the ocean, and then offers ways to fix it.
What is problem and solution?
This text feature breaks a long article into smaller sections and tells you what that section will be about.
What is a subheading (or heading)?
A statement that expresses a person's feelings, beliefs, or judgments and cannot be proven.
What is an opinion?
he emotional feeling or idea a word carries, like the difference between "thrifty" (positive) and "cheap" (negative).
What is connotation?
An educated guess or conclusion you make based on evidence from the text plus your own background knowledge.
What is an inference?
This text structure organizes events in the order they happened, using words like "first," "next," and "later."
What is chronological (or sequential) order?
This feature, often found in the back of a book, lists topics and the page numbers where you can find them.
What is an index?
Words like "best," "worst," "should," "awful," and "beautiful" are signal words for this.
What is an opinion?
The primary reason an author writes a text; in biased texts, this is almost always "to persuade."
What is the author's purpose?
To briefly restate the main points of a text in your own words.
What is to summarize?
An author using ethos, pathos, and logos is almost always writing with this primary purpose.
What is to persuade?
A chart that visually represents data, often using bars, lines, or circles.
What is a graph?
An opinion given by someone with special knowledge or credentials on a topic, like a scientist's analysis of data.
What is an expert opinion?
An appeal to the speaker's credibility, trustworthiness, or moral character.
What is ethos?
The single sentence, usually at the end of the introduction, that states the author's main argument or claim.
What is a thesis statement?