Emotional Words

Each question will be about a different angle of the passage. For questions asking about the author’s emotions, find words in the passage that are adjectives describing emotions.

So, if a question asks what sort of attitude an author had towards the passage or subject, then look throughout the passage for attitude words that might convey a positive or negative attitude. Are words such as brilliant, excited, delightful used, or are words such as depressive, gloomy, disappointing used?

A lot of questions could be answered correctly simply by going through and circling all the adjectives in a passage. Without looking at anything else except for the adjectives in a passage, most questions about attitude or emotion could be answered correctly.

Another way of handling these situations is to arrange all of the answer choices in a list going from most negative to most positive.

Example:

Question: The author’s attitude on this topic is best described as:

A. indignation

B. eagerness

C. impartiality

D. fear

E. consent

Now arrange these in order from negative to positive:

( - ) indignation, fear, impartiality, consent, eagerness (+)

This will help sort out the different choices and keep you from overlooking an answer choice and making an easy mistake.