How to use this map
This is the map of the terrain: every skill the GED Reasoning Through Language Arts test asks of you, gathered in one place and numbered. Each number here belongs to a quiz — Quiz 31 practices Topic 31 — and the quizzes are arriving one by one, each under its own figure. The series is called Talking Figures. Its first run came under hands, and those pages call themselves the Talking Hands Series; from Quiz 10 on, other figures take their turn, an eye, a voice, a face, a drum, as the map's sections change. Built so far: Quizzes 1 through 10 and 31 through 47, with two interludes between them.
Use the map three ways. Before a quiz, find its number and look at the neighborhood — what it sits beside, what it leads to. After a quiz, check the topic off: on a screen, this page remembers your checks on your own device; on paper, a pencil works the way pencils always have. A yellow number means that quiz is already built and waiting for you. And every few weeks, step back and look at the whole map — the checked ground is territory you hold. Inside the quizzes, a small pointing hand — ☞ — marks the places where one skill holds hands with another. It's an old reader's mark, five hundred years old, and now it's ours.
A word about order: the numbers are addresses, not a marching order. We travel this map by trails — a reading quiz and a language quiz usually walk together, and sometimes the path jumps ahead (from 34 straight to 43, say) because one skill is calling for its partner. When a quiz leans on an earlier one, its ☞ line says so; follow your teacher's path in class, and on your own, follow the pointing hands. Studying alone? The reading quizzes go in number order, 1 onward. The language quizzes go in number order with one planned detour: 31 through 34, then 43, 44, and 47 — the punctuation those four explain — then back to 35 and onward. Take one of each together, and every six quizzes or so, a poem. And whichever trail you're on, read the key even when you're right — the traps are part of the curriculum.
One more thing, because it's true: you are not starting from zero. You already use most of these skills every day — reading a lease, weighing an argument, catching an ad in the act of working on you. The quizzes give names to what your mind already does, and practice at doing it on purpose. Section X isn't on the test at all. It's here anyway, because reading is bigger than any test — and because everything in it makes you stronger at everything above it.
I · Reading — Comprehension Foundations
Can you find what a text says — and what it shows?
II · Reading — Craft & the Author's Moves
How writers build their effects on purpose.
III · Reading — Argument & Evaluation
The heart of the test: claims, evidence, and how to judge them.
IV · Reading — Literature
Stories: how fiction means.
V · Text Types & Paired Passages
The kinds of texts the test uses — and how to read two at once.
VI · Language — Sentence Structure
How sentences are built.
VII · Language — Grammar & Usage
Making words agree and behave.
VIII · Language — Punctuation & Mechanics
The marks — and the logic behind them.
IX · The Extended Response
The essay, broken into pieces you can practice one at a time.
X · Defiance by Addition
Not on the test. On the list anyway.