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Question 1. What is the Passage Type?
Question 2. What is each paragraph about?
Question 3. What is the Organization?
Question 4. What is the Big Idea?
Question 5. What is the author’s purpose?

Here you uncover the author’s organization and develop a road map about the text.

What is a road map?

A roadmap is a short exercise you do to paraphrase the main point of each paragraph. Making a mental road map (and writing it down on your white board) takes time. However this time is justified and especially beneficial.

Why do you need to make a road map of an essay?

1) To uncover the author’s main point on harder essays, you will need to combine the author's statements with his or her organizational structure; this will help you to discover the essay’s general theme. Outlining the structure will make the essay’s purpose and underlying reasoning more apparent.

2) Detail questions ask you to answer questions related to a certain topic. If you know the organization of the essay and have a mental road map of where certain information is located, you will be much faster in pulling details from the essay.

3) Writing down content doubles its exposure to your brain inputs, increasing the retention rate of the content. This makes rereading less necessary and ultimately saves you time.

4) The road map is a mental crutch. It forces you to focus on the overall structure and topic issues rather than details.

NOTE: You are taking the test on a computer screen. You cannot label the paragraphs on the screen. Instead, remember the structure as you proceed and/or draw a rough diagram of the essay as you go.

Building a roadmap

Let’s look at our example.

P1: Author tells us that the passage will be about problems in water management. He gives us two problems:
Problem 1) technology-related,
Problem 2) conflict between flood control and irrigation (balance between too much water and too little)

At this point, you know the topic will be a discussion of problems in water management (the author lists two of them, so clearly we’re getting into the specific problems).

P2: Author continues to discuss more problems. Cities directly on rivers lead to difficult water management challenges.

Problem 3) Climate variance (unpredictable change from lots of water to little and back again)
Problem 4) Extension of problem 3: Difficulties lead to need for dramatic human intervention, including reversing flow of rivers

Paragraph 2 is a natural extension of paragraph 1. Possibly, the author will just list problems in water management. But last paragraphs, like first paragraphs, often present main idea. We go into paragraph 3 looking for a signal that the author will offer more than a list.

P3: Aha, we get more than a list! The startling fact is that government has bungled water management. Basically, the biggest problem is not the inherent difficulties in water management; it’s the incompetent way government has dealt with the problem, again and again. Specifically, government has done what it often does—make lots of agencies that don’t work together.

So the essay flows from “Water management is tough, Look at all these problems” to “You’d think government would try to deal with these problems effectively. Instead, it’s making them worse”.

Here's how you might write out this roadmap:

Once you’ve practiced this process enough, it will become natural to you. Eventually you will no longer need to write down your roadmap. It will become a mental map, which you can refer to easily.

Question 3 (continued): Advanced Mapping Strategies