Reading a Passage You Have Never Seen

What the prompt actually says

The prose fiction prompt gives you a short headnote, a passage of roughly six hundred to a thousand words that you have never seen, and one sentence of instruction: analyse how the author uses literary elements and techniques to convey a stated idea — a character's complex attitude, a shifting relationship, the meaning of a return.

Two words in that sentence carry the whole task. How, not what. And convey, not feel. You are being asked to describe a piece of construction, not to report an emotion.

The headnote is data

The italic line above the passage tells you the period, sometimes the situation, sometimes nothing else. It is not decoration. If it says the character has come back after eleven years, then every present-tense detail in the passage is being measured against something absent, and the passage is built to let you feel that measuring.

The eight-minute read

Read once, fast, with a pencil. You are not looking for devices. You are looking for four things, in this order: who is narrating, how close the narration stands to the character, where the voice leans, and where the passage changes.

Notice that none of the four is the plot. In a passage this short, the plot is usually one small event — a woman walks through a house, a clerk is called into an office, a man remembers a decision. That event is not your subject. It is the surface on which the four things above become visible.

Marking the page

Bracket the sentence where the rhythm breaks. Circle any word that seems too strong or too flat for what it describes. Put a line in the margin wherever the narration uses a word the character would use rather than a word the narrator would use. By the end of the read you should have between six and ten marks, and three of them will become your body paragraphs.