#6 - Global Reference, Main Point

[deck1134]

Hi PowerScore Staff,

I was hoping to get some help with the Main Point question for this passage. I was able to eliminate C and E with ease, and then got down to A, B and D.

I realized that A was a weaker answer, and eliminated that as well.

Then, looked at B and D, I got stuck. Why is answer D wrong? I legitimately do not understand. Similarly, while D is a strong answer, Gluck doesn't write in opposition to the critics. She just writes.

I HATE main point questions on RC. This is a prime example. I tend to find that the "wrong" answer for a MP just summarizes one paragraph of the passage. That is what D does here. But somehow, this is the right answer.

[Adam Tyson]

Main Point is at the heart of all Reading Comp, Deck, and in my experience students who struggle with identifying the main point of a passage are likely to struggle with much more than that. What would the author agree with? His main point. What would he disagree with? Anything that opposes his main point. What was the purpose of the passage? To convey the main point. Etc. Main point flows through almost every question! For that reason, it is critical that you prephrase the main point before you even look at the first question, right after reading the passage and while it is still fresh in your mind.

How do you do that? Think of it as a summary of everything important that you read, but a summary that is concise and expressed in one sentence. Avoid using the phrase “it talked about”, because that’s usually going to lead you into the weeds of the details of the passage. Instead, ask yourself what the author wanted to prove, or what was the big picture. Consider breaking it down by paragraph – each paragraph was about something distinct, and the main point has to pull all of them together.

In this passage, that might look something like this:

Unlike other female poets, Gluck wrote in a tradition established by male poets, because she felt that they were here literary heritage and they covered broad, universal ideas, so critics were wrong about women being unable to do that, and anyway her female perspective would come out on its own without her forcing it.

It’s a long, run-on sentence, so not the prettiest thing we could come up with, but we don’t want to take time to polish and perfect it. This is a rough draft, just to clarify in our minds what we just read and prepare for a bunch of questions, one of which may ask us what the main point was.

It can also help to take note of a common structure used in the passage, as the passage do often use familiar themes and approaches. In this case, it’s the very common structure of “an artist/writer/scientist/thinker did something in a way that critics thought was wrong, but the critics were wrong, and here’s why.” Once you realize that this passage falls into that common structure, the prephrase of the Main Point gets much easier, because it is essentially the same every time: This person did something, critics didn’t like it, but they were wrong, because XYZ.”

Spend some time working on that Main Point prephrase on EVERY passage, BEFORE you proceed to the answer choices. Don’t worry about how long it takes at first, because the payoff in that investment of time will be more accurate answers, greater confidence in selecting them, and ultimately better timing on the section as a whole due to less time wasted debating between answer choices. With the prephase in hand, you will be well armed for almost every question they can throw at you. Without one, you are wandering into the forest of questions naked and alone.

Practice, and good luck, Deck!

[catherineshi99]

Hi there,

Could someone explain why B) is wrong and D) is correct? I discarded D because of "...Gluck writes on universal themes..." and in the passage, there's no mention of what Gluck writes about.

Thanks!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Catherine,

We can know she wrote about universal themes because the first paragraph tells us that she followed the traditional poets, who wrote about traditional themes, and she believed that those themes were available regardless of gender. The reason that answer choice (B) fails is because it doesn't address the gender differences that Gluck did think would emerge. She didn't feel the need to consciously confine herself to female themes, but she felt that her gender would unconsciously come through in different ways.

Hope that helps!

[Luke34]

I think that some of the explanations here are not totally adequate to explain why D is correct. As Catherine points out, there is no mention of what Gluck writes about in the passage, and the reader is left to infer this from comments made about the "tradition" Gluck writes in. I find this a tenuous inference, and trying to parse something like that in the small minute or so you can realistically spend on a RC question seems to me like a bad strategy. Instead, I think an easier factor that distinguishes D from a similar answer like B is D's accurate mention of specific points from across the passage. B and D both attempt to do this, but B is unsuccessful because it says the critics want to write about "women's concerns" as a subject rather than developing a "uniquely female voice." D mentions this uniquely female voice, and this is supported by the passage, while B does not, and B's alternative is not found within the passage.

Similarly, I think the method of looking for accurate main details from across the passage works to put D over the other answers too. A only brings in details from the last paragraph. C makes no reference whatsoever to the last paragraph of the passage. E is entirely outside the scope of the passage. I think this method, quickly checking each answer choice against the passage to see which accurately mentions details from the most parts of the passage, is best for explaining correct main point answers. If some Powerscore staff want to correct me I am open to hearing them out, but I think this quick reference method is more reliable than trying to come up with a prephrase that is likely to find a match in the answer choices, or some other method entirely.

[Robert Carroll]

Luke,

That strategy won't work in all cases. Many correct answers for Main Point questions mention no details from anywhere in the passage. In fact, it's pretty typical that a Main Point answer doesn't have to mention a detail at all - it's intended to sum up the entire content of the passage. While mentioning a detail doesn't necessarily make an answer wrong, failing to mention any details doesn't make an answer wrong either. So the strategy of looking for whether the answer mentions details from several parts of the passage won't always work.

In fact, I think getting lost in details is going exactly the wrong way for a Main Point question. Your prephrase should sum up the content of the entire passage. You look for an answer that is appropriately broad in scope. If an answer mentions details, your first thought should be "Is this too focused on something specific and not general enough?" Finding that detail repeated in several parts of the passage doesn't really tell me it's general enough, either. So I think the strategy is too unreliable to be used.

I've seen several times in this thread mention of how absent or at least difficult to find the reference to "universal themes" is in the passage. I entirely disagree - it's essential to the passage's point that, rather than focus on some circumscribed "women's poetry", Glück believes that she, like traditional male poets, should write on broad themes - lines 20-28 talk about this, and to have passed over these lines without having understood that point is to have failed to understand these lines at all. So in reading the passage, I get some idea like "critics want Glück to write in a certain way, she thinks she can write in a way that appeals to all sorts of people". Universal themes! So, if that requires an inference, it's an inference without which one cannot have understood a major point of the passage.

Robert Carroll

[SGD2021]

Hello,

I am still not very clear on why this part of answer choice D is correct: "Glück WRITES on universal themes...". We weren't really told what Gluck WRITES, so where is the support for this in the passage?

[Adam Tyson]

The whole passage is about the kind of poetry that Gluck writes, SGD2021! It starts right in the first line:

The poet Louise Gluck has said that she feels comfortable writing within a tradition often characterized as belonging only to male poets.

She's not just talking about poetry or analyzing the works of other poets. This isn't about her ideas alone, but about how those ideas shaped her poetry. And the critics are talking about her writing, too - see the reference to Gluck's "poetic forms" in the third paragraph.