GACE English Review
Grammar – There wasn’t really that much grammar in this test, but you might still want to be
familiar with these bits of grammar.
Comma Splice
Run-On Sentence
Subject-Verb Agreement
Sentence Fragments
Parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, adverb, conjunction, preposition, article,
interjection)
Literary Terms
Colloquial language
Dialogue
Dramatic Irony
Figurative Language
Foreshadowing
Imagery
Irony
When asked to analyze sample student work to point out its strengths and/or weaknesses, talking
about it in any of the terms below will work almost every time.
Sentence Structure – Are there a lot of run-on sentences and/or comma splices? Are there
sentence fragments? Do the sentence structures vary or are they all simple sentences or
compound sentences?
Organization – Does the student use paragraphs? Does the student have a logical progression of
ideas or do they jump from one idea to another? Do they follow any sort of structure? Do they
support statements that they make with evidence from a text, source, etc.
Imagery – Does the writer use a lot of figurative language (metaphors, similes, hyperbole?) or
use really descriptive words (strong adjectives) that appeal to thee senses (sensory words).
Voice – What does the student do to allow his or her personality to come through in the writing?
Does the writer use rhetorical questions? Does the writer employ humor? What point of view
does the writer use (first, second, third person, third person omniscient)?
American Literature – Mostly Post-Civil War Movements – Perhaps a good way to brush up
on this, especially pre-civil war stuff, would be to flip through a literature anthology from school.
This especially helps to become familiar with more authors.
Transcendentalism
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
Romanticism (1820 – 1865)
- Emphasis on individual, “I”, the subjective experience
- Harmony in nature
- Use of looser poetic forms
- Primitivism; “noble savage”
- Sensual; embraces the sensory
- Value placed on intuition/emotion
- Rejected order in favor of wildness/boundlessness
Writers:
Walt Whitman
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Herman Melville (Moby Dick) (considered the
Dark Romantics)
Walt Whitman’s famous work Leaves of Grass (1955) is the bridge between
Romanticism and Realism. “Drum Taps” is a famous section from Leaves of Grass about
Whitman’s experience in the Civil War.
Realism (1865 – 1914)
- Response to Civil War; other influencing factors were the Industrial Revolution in the
late 19th century and the development of new machinery and importance of science and
empirical data over human subjectivity
- Concerned with present life, not afterlife
- Fading spirituality (Origin of Species, 1859)
- Mimeticism / verisimilitude – writing that mirrors “real” life
- Absence of symbolic characters
- Slice of Life
- Resolution of conflict
- Disillusionment
- Emphasis on common man and common experience
- Local color and psychological realism
- William Dean Howells – clearly defines for readers and writers what Realism is 
“nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”
Defining texts:
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)
William Dean Howells – “Editha”
Criticism & Fiction
Upton Sinclair
Schools of Realism:
-
local color – associated with regionalism
-
-
 faithful rendering of people / dialect / culture of a specific time and place
 Writers: Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn) and Kate Chopin (The Awakening)
psychological realism – dealt with the subtleties of the mind
 Writer: Henry James
Most of Whitman’s work can be characterized as being Romantic
Civil War changed him
William Dean Howells – clearly defines for readers and writers what Realism is 
“nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”
Naturalism
- kind of branches off of Realism
Defining texts/writers:
Stephen Crane – Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Jack London
A helpful chart for remembering the characteristics of these separate, but related movements
might be:
Questions that arose with the transition from Romanticism to Realism were how much
control and free will humanity had the ability to exercise in determining one’s destiny.
Genre
American Author
Perceived the individual
as...
a god
Romantics
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Realists
Henry James
William Dean Howells
Mark Twain
simply a person
Naturalists
Stephen Crane
Frank Norris
a helpless object
Modernism (1914 – 1945)
- Formal experimentation
- Themes of isolation and alientation
- Breakdown of language / failure to communicate
- Loss of spirituality
- Fragmentation (form and theme)
- Presence of multiple narrators
Defining texts:
T. S. Eliot – The Wasteland (1922)
Jean Toomer – Cane
Ezra Pound – Cantos
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Dubliners
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls
William Faulkner – Sound and the Fury
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Harlem Renaissance (kind of a subset of Modernism, but not really included)
Alain Locke – The New Negro
Jean Toomer – Cane (1922)
Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
Post Modernism – (1945 [65] – present?) – The Atomic Bomb
- Black, cynical, twisted humor
- Sometimes tends toward absurdity
- Loss of identity
- Uncontrollable fear of death
- Explores commercialism/consumerism
- Alienation / fragmentation
- Complete breakdown of communication
- Loss of faith
Defining texts:
Don Delillo – White Noise (1985)
Joseph Heller – Catch 22 (1955)
Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
Edward Albee – The Zoo Story (1958)
Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman (1966)
Miscellaneous things to be familiar with
Sources – know the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources.
Media Literacy – basically what you will probably need to be able to do is read short scenerios
(descriptions of commercials or ads and determine what it is the advertisers are wanting
consumers to think—for example a commercial that has a very attractive woman drinking a Dr.
Pepper might indicate that the advertisers are hoping to link the idea of being attractive with
buying and drinking Dr. Pepper.)
Important terms:
Gate-keepers – the individuals and corporations that control what information will
be sent to the general public
Inverted Pyramid – structure used in newspaper articles where the most important is
given in the headline and the first few sentences and the more insignificant the details, the
farther along in the article it is going to appear
Bias – the point of view of the arguer, advertiser and/or any other source of information
takes to a certain idea/belief/concept, etc.
Slant – the subtle arrangement of words and use of word choice that puts forth or reveals
a particular bias
Ex. The headline “Braves Win 5-0 over Padres” vs. “Atlanta Braves rejoice in
Padre shut-out!” The first headline seems rather neutral while the second
headline seems to possess the bias of being written by a Braves fan.
Rhetorical Fallacies – to go along with knowing about media literacy, they really test whether
or not you can identify common rhetorical fallacies, or errors in reasoning. Here are some really
common ones.
Attack ad hominem – attacking the credibility or the character of the person making the
argument instead of attacking their arguments
Ex. “You know that she can’t have that great of an argument, she’s a woman after
all.”
“Who is he to tell us about what is ethically right or wrong? His family made
their money exploiting other people!”
Bandwagon Effect – the argument that you should do or think something because
everyone else is
Ex. “The majority of people in America believe that abortion is murder. So many
people cannot be wrong.”
False Causality – the argument that A causes B just because A came before B
Ex. “You only started failing classes since you met HIM. That’s how I know that
he is the cause of your bad report card.”
Red Herring – a complete divergence from the issue/topic; a diversion
Ex. “There have been allegations that I stole money from the club’s treasury; but,
look at how many events we have been able to participate in. Obviously, there
was plenty of money.”
Slippery Slope – saying that one action will lead to another which will lead to
another
in a snowball effect; usually talking about negative things
Ex. “If I let you go to the bathroom now, then you will miss VERY important
information, if you miss this information then you’ll fail your test and if you fail
this test you’ll fail this class. You won’t get into a good college, which means
you won’t be able to get a good job.”
Strawman – creating a weak outline of your opponent’s beliefs/stance/argument so you
can easily tear it down
Ex. “Senator Kennedy is opposed to the military spending bill, saying that it’s too
costly. Why does he always want to slash everything to the bone? He wants a
pint-sized military that couldn’t fight off a crazed band of terrorists, let along a
rogue nation.”