High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Text Structure And Effects

A story opens: "The house was empty by noon. Three weeks earlier, Mara still believed her family would stay." What idea does this order stress?

A narrator says, "Grandma's story and mine braid together, chapter by chapter, until they meet." What does "braid" suggest about the structure?

A story about a family's hard year opens and closes with "The river kept moving, as it always had." What idea does this framing stress?

"Now eighty, Ruth smiled at the old photo. At nine, she had hated that dress." What does this shift in time suggest?

"He tore the envelope open. Outside, a dog barked. A car passed. The kettle hissed. Then he read it." Why add the details before he reads?

First they took down the swing set.

Then the garden, which my father had planted the spring my sister was born, and which he had weeded every Saturday of my childhood, kneeling on a folded towel because of his knees.

Then the shed, board by board, the nails pulled and dropped into a coffee can.

Then the tree.

The tree was the hardest. It had been there before the house, before my parents, before the street had a name. The man with the chainsaw apologized before he started, which surprised me. He said he always apologized to the old ones.

Then the house itself, in a single afternoon, faster than seemed possible for something that had held us for thirty-one years.

Then the lot was empty, and I stood on the sidewalk, and I understood that a place is not a thing you can save by remembering it.

How does the author's choice to structure the passage as a sequence of demolitions, each introduced by "Then," contribute to its meaning?

Poem: "Inventory After the Flood"

One piano, ruined. One wedding album, ruined. One cat, safe on the second floor, complaining. One box of letters from a boy I did not marry, ruined, and I did not know until today that I had kept them. One mother's china, six plates of eight, ruined. One self, standing in the doorway, counting. One self, standing in the doorway, not counting anymore.

How does the poem's structural shift in the final four lines change the meaning of the "inventory"?

Excerpt from a memoir

Before I describe the accident, I need to describe the kitchen.

The kitchen had yellow curtains my grandmother had sewn from a tablecloth. It had a linoleum floor with a burn mark near the stove from a pan my father had dropped in 1987. It had a radio on the windowsill that only picked up two stations, one in Spanish and one in static. It had a calendar from the hardware store, still showing March, though it was July.

I need you to see the kitchen because I need you to understand that when the accident happened, it did not happen in a place. It happened in this place. Not a kitchen. Our kitchen. With the curtains and the burn mark and the wrong month on the wall.

The accident itself took less than a minute to describe. I could give it to you in a single sentence. But a sentence would be a lie. The truth is the kitchen, and everything the kitchen held, and the fact that after that afternoon we never used the room again.

Why does the memoirist choose to describe the kitchen in detail before narrating the accident?

From a story, "Notes Toward a Eulogy"

DRAFT ONE: My uncle was a kind man who loved fishing.

DRAFT TWO: My uncle was a complicated man who loved fishing, and also drinking, and also arguing with my mother about things neither of them could change.

DRAFT THREE: My uncle was a man. He fished. He drank. He argued with my mother. He was kind to me on Tuesdays, when he picked me up from school, and less kind on other days, when he did not.

DRAFT FOUR: I do not know how to write about my uncle.

DRAFT FIVE: My uncle was the first person who ever told me the truth about anything. He told me my grandfather had not died the way we said he died. He told me when I was eleven. He said, "You should know. Someone should tell you." Then he took me fishing.

I will read Draft Five tomorrow. Not because it is the whole truth. Because it is the part of the truth I want to say out loud.

The story's structure—presenting five successive drafts of a eulogy—most effectively develops which idea?

The novel opens with the funeral.

Chapter One is Aunt Vera in a black dress she borrowed and never returned. Chapter Two is the will, read aloud in a lawyer's office that smells of old paper. Chapter Three is the argument, which becomes the lawsuit, which becomes the estrangement.

Only in Chapter Fourteen do we meet the man whose funeral began the book. He is nineteen, and he has just fallen in love for the first time, and he is standing on a bridge in a city he will leave in the morning and never return to. He does not know any of this. He is happy in the way only nineteen-year-olds can be happy—completely, and without evidence.

When I first read the novel, I resented Chapter Fourteen. I wanted to get back to the lawsuit. Now, older, I understand: the author put the funeral first so that we would grieve the young man on the bridge before we ever met him. So that his happiness, when it came, would already be haunted.

According to the passage, what is the primary effect of the novel's structural choice to open with the funeral?

Scene from a one-act play, "The Interview"

[A small office. MARA, 17, sits across from MR. HALE, a college admissions officer. A folder sits between them, unopened.]

MR. HALE: So. Tell me why you want to attend.

MARA: I've written it all down. In the essay.

MR. HALE: I've read the essay.

MARA: Then you know.

MR. HALE: I know what you wrote. That's different.

[A pause. MARA glances at the folder.]

MARA: My mother went here.

MR. HALE: That's not in the essay.

MARA: No.

MR. HALE: Why isn't it?

MARA: Because I didn't want it to be the reason.

MR. HALE: Is it the reason?

[MARA does not answer. MR. HALE opens the folder.]

MR. HALE: Let's start again.

What is the effect of structuring the scene so that the folder remains unopened until the final stage direction?

From a short story

The story is told twice.

The first time, it is told by the mother. She says her daughter left in September, without warning, and that she has not heard from her since. She says she does not know why. She says she was a good mother. She says this last sentence four times across her account, in slightly different words.

The second time, the story is told by the daughter. She says she left in September, and that she wrote her mother a letter explaining everything, and that she has waited three years for a reply. She says she does not know why her mother has not written back. She says she was a good daughter. She says this last sentence four times across her account, in slightly different words.

The reader is left to decide what to believe. But the story does not ask the reader to choose between them. The story asks the reader to notice that both women use the same defense, four times, and that neither of them mentions the letter until the letter is the only thing left to mention.

What is the effect of structuring the story as two parallel accounts rather than a single narrative?

The novel is divided into three parts, each titled with a season.

"Summer" is 240 pages long. In it, almost nothing happens. Two brothers work on their uncle's farm. They argue about a girl. They swim in the reservoir. They lie on the roof and watch satellites cross the sky.

"Autumn" is 18 pages long. The uncle dies. The farm is sold. The girl marries someone else. The older brother enlists. The younger brother is left alone in a rented room in a city he does not know.

"Winter" is a single page. It contains one sentence: "He learned, that year, to be a person no one was waiting for."

Critics have complained about the imbalance. I think the imbalance is the point. Youth is long because we do not yet know it will end. What comes after is short because, by then, we are only counting.

The commentator suggests that the novel's uneven section lengths function primarily to:

The lighthouse keeper's log, June 14

Morning: fog. Rang the bell every ninety seconds as required.

Afternoon: fog thicker. Bell every ninety seconds.

Evening: heard a voice from the rocks. Called out. No answer. Rang the bell.

June 15

Morning: clear. No wreckage. No body. Rang the bell out of habit before I realized.

June 16

Stopped ringing the bell in clear weather. Started ringing it at night, in my head, when I cannot sleep.

June 20

The inspector came. Said my logs were unusually brief. I told him a log is for facts. He asked whether I had all the facts. I said no man does.

June 30

I have begun to wonder whether the voice was mine.

How does the shift from external, factual entries to internal, uncertain entries reflect the author's structural choices?

The clock in the hallway had not worked in seventeen years, but every Sunday my grandmother wound it anyway.

She would climb the little stool, open the glass face, and turn the brass key three careful times. Then she would step back, listen to the silence, and nod as though satisfied.

I was twelve the summer I finally asked her why.

"Because your grandfather liked the sound," she said.

"But it doesn't make a sound," I said.

She smiled the way adults smile when children have missed something obvious. "It makes the sound of me winding it," she said. "That's a sound too."

I did not understand her then. I understood her the following March, when she died, and I found myself climbing the little stool on a Sunday afternoon, turning the brass key three careful times, listening to the silence, and nodding.

How does the author's decision to delay the narrator's understanding until the final paragraph shape the meaning of the story?

I will tell you the ending first, because the ending is the only part I remember clearly.

We lost. 3 to 2. In overtime. On a goal I should have stopped and did not.

Now let me tell you the middle, which is a blur of green grass and shouting and the taste of copper in my mouth from where I bit my lip in the second half.

And the beginning: the bus ride, my headphones, my mother waving from the parking lot, my coach saying, "Just play your game," as if I had one, as if any of us did at sixteen.

I tell it backward because forward is the way we lie to ourselves. Forward makes it seem like the goal was the destination, like everything led there. But nothing led there. It just happened. And I have spent four years arranging the rest of my life around a single second I would like to un-live.

The narrator's decision to tell the story in reverse chronological order most directly serves what purpose?

From a short story, "The Cartographer's Daughter"

My father drew maps for a living. Real maps, the paper kind, before satellites made his profession quaint.

He told the story of my mother in pieces, over years, and never in order. When I was seven, I learned she had loved sailing. When I was ten, I learned she had grown up in a town that no longer existed, absorbed into a larger city. When I was fourteen, I learned how she had died. When I was nineteen, I learned how they had met.

I used to think he was cruel to withhold. I thought he was punishing me, or himself, or her.

I understand now that he was drawing a map. You do not draw a map by beginning at the beginning. You draw the coastlines first, then the mountains, then the rivers, then—last of all, and only when you know where everything else lies—the roads that connect them.

He was giving me my mother the way he gave the world to his clients: in the order that made her legible.

The author structures the father's revelations out of chronological order primarily to develop which idea?