Text Completion: reading for the clue

What a Text Completion asks

A Text Completion gives you a passage of one to five sentences with one, two or three blanks. With one blank you choose from five words or phrases; with two or three blanks each blank has its own column of three. There is no partial credit: every blank must be right.

The question is not "which word is the most sophisticated" or "which word do I like here". It is narrower: which choice does the passage itself require? Every sentence is written so that some of its words force the meaning of the blank. Those words are the clue. Your first job is to find them.

Two questions before you look at the choices

Cover the choices and ask:

1. What is the blank about? Name the thing the missing word describes: a person's manner, the state of the soil, the reaction of critics.
2. What else in the passage tells me about that thing? Look for a phrase that describes the same thing in other words, explains its cause or result, gives an example of it, or sets it against something.

If you cannot answer the second question, you have not finished reading. The clue is often in a different clause, after a colon, or in the following sentence.

Four kinds of clue

Kind	What it looks like	What it tells you
Restatement	a colon, a semicolon, "that is", an appositive phrase	the blank means roughly what the clue says
Contrast	"although", "but", "far from", "rather than"	the blank means roughly the opposite of the clue
Cause and effect	"because", "so ... that", "as a result"	the blank is what produces, or follows from, the clue
Example	a list of actions or details	the blank names the quality the examples share

Restatement is the most generous kind of clue: if the sentence says "she labelled every folder and cross-checked each date", the blank describing her is something like careful. The next lesson deals with signal words in detail; here the point is that you can usually name the direction of the blank before you see a single choice.

Predict in plain words

Once you have the clue, write or think a prediction in your own, simple words: "careful", "fast", "long", "drains water easily". It does not need to be elegant, and it often should not be a single word. A rough prediction does two things. It protects you from choices designed to sound right, and it saves time, because you can reject most choices in a second each.

Then compare each choice with your prediction, not with the sentence. A choice that means roughly what you predicted stays; one that does not goes. If two choices survive, go back to the clue and make the prediction sharper. If none survives, your prediction is probably reversed: check whether you missed a "not" or a contrast word.

Why the wrong choices tempt you

Wrong choices on a well-built item are not random. They usually belong to one of these families:

• Topic words. A word that belongs to the subject of the sentence but does not fit its logic. In a sentence about a bridge that expands in heat, corrosion is a bridge word, but heat does not cause it.
• Reversals. The opposite of the answer, waiting for anyone who missed a contrast.
• Plausible but unsupported. A word that could be true of the subject in real life, but that nothing in the sentence supports.
• Right tone, wrong meaning. A word with the same positive or negative charge as the answer but a different sense.

Knowing these families makes elimination faster: you can say why each wrong choice is wrong, not only that it "feels off".

Finish by rereading

Put your choice into the blank and read the whole passage once more. It should read as something a careful writer would publish, with the clue and the blank agreeing. This takes a few seconds and catches most slips, especially reversals.