Humanities Passages · Lesson 1

Reading essays on art, music and ideas

Humanities passages are essays about art, music, books, crafts, buildings, language, and ideas. Many are personal: the writer describes something, then tells you what it means or whether it works. On any of them, your first job is to find two things: the subject (what the essay is about) and the claim (what the writer thinks about it).

These writers mix two kinds of sentences. Description tells you what something looks like or what happened, and anyone could check it. Judgment tells you what the writer thinks of it. Judgment carries evaluation words (beautifully, uneven, proper, rarer, better) or opinion signals (I think, I would argue, I have come to believe). The claim is built from judgment, so when a question asks for the main point, look for those words, not for the longest stretch of description.

A useful routine: after each paragraph, ask "Did the writer just show me something, or tell me what to think of it?" The paragraphs that tell you what to think usually hold the answer to main-idea questions.

Description or judgment?
SentenceKindClue
The concert hall seats nine hundred people.DescriptionA fact anyone could check
The hall's sound is warm but a little muddy in the balcony.Judgmentwarm, muddy: the writer rates the sound
The violinist played the slow movement from memory.DescriptionReports what happened
I would argue that small halls suit quiet music best.JudgmentI would argue signals a claim

The Wall on Tanner Street

1For eleven years, the side of the hardware store on Tanner Street was a blank expanse of tan brick, notable only for a faded arrow pointing toward a parking lot that no longer existed. Then, over one wet spring, a painter named Odile Marsh covered it with a mural of the street itself: the same hardware store, the bakery across the road, the bus shelter, and dozens of small figures going about an ordinary morning. Many of the figures are recognizable neighbors. The man who sweeps the bakery steps is there, broom in hand, and so is the crossing guard, holding up a sign that reads, in tiny letters, "Slow Down, Look Up."

2As a piece of painting, the mural is uneven. Marsh handles brick and glass beautifully; the bakery window seems to hold real morning light. Her people are another matter. Their hands are stiff, their faces are flat ovals, and several of them seem to float an inch above the sidewalk. A visitor who judged the wall only by its technique would leave unimpressed.

3I think that visitor would be judging the wrong thing. The mural's real achievement is not on the wall but in front of it. Since it was finished, people stop. They hunt for themselves and their neighbors among the figures, they point, and they argue about whether the bus shelter is painted the right shade of green. The owner of the hardware store told me that strangers now ask him for directions they do not need, just to start a conversation about the painting. A street that people once hurried along has become a place where they linger.

4That, I would argue, is the proper measure of public art. A painting in a museum asks to be studied; a painting on a street asks to be lived beside. Its success depends less on how skillfully a face is rendered than on whether it changes the way people use the space around it. By that standard, the stiff hands and floating feet hardly matter. Marsh has made a wall that persuades a neighborhood to look at itself, and that is rarer than good brushwork.

5None of this means technique is unimportant. A clumsier painter might have produced a wall that people ignored. But Marsh seems to have understood which skills the job required: a sharp eye for the places everyone knew, and a willingness to put ordinary people where they could find themselves. The sign in the crossing guard's hand turns out to be good advice for anyone who walks by.

Worked example Easy

Show the whole passage

The Wall on Tanner Street

1For eleven years, the side of the hardware store on Tanner Street was a blank expanse of tan brick, notable only for a faded arrow pointing toward a parking lot that no longer existed. Then, over one wet spring, a painter named Odile Marsh covered it with a mural of the street itself: the same hardware store, the bakery across the road, the bus shelter, and dozens of small figures going about an ordinary morning. Many of the figures are recognizable neighbors. The man who sweeps the bakery steps is there, broom in hand, and so is the crossing guard, holding up a sign that reads, in tiny letters, "Slow Down, Look Up."

2As a piece of painting, the mural is uneven. Marsh handles brick and glass beautifully; the bakery window seems to hold real morning light. Her people are another matter. Their hands are stiff, their faces are flat ovals, and several of them seem to float an inch above the sidewalk. A visitor who judged the wall only by its technique would leave unimpressed.

3I think that visitor would be judging the wrong thing. The mural's real achievement is not on the wall but in front of it. Since it was finished, people stop. They hunt for themselves and their neighbors among the figures, they point, and they argue about whether the bus shelter is painted the right shade of green. The owner of the hardware store told me that strangers now ask him for directions they do not need, just to start a conversation about the painting. A street that people once hurried along has become a place where they linger.

4That, I would argue, is the proper measure of public art. A painting in a museum asks to be studied; a painting on a street asks to be lived beside. Its success depends less on how skillfully a face is rendered than on whether it changes the way people use the space around it. By that standard, the stiff hands and floating feet hardly matter. Marsh has made a wall that persuades a neighborhood to look at itself, and that is rarer than good brushwork.

5None of this means technique is unimportant. A clumsier painter might have produced a wall that people ignored. But Marsh seems to have understood which skills the job required: a sharp eye for the places everyone knew, and a willingness to put ordinary people where they could find themselves. The sign in the crossing guard's hand turns out to be good advice for anyone who walks by.

Which choice best states the author's main claim about the Tanner Street mural?

  1. Its painted figures are the most skillful part of the work.
  2. It succeeds because it changes how people use the street.Answer
  3. It would be better appreciated inside a museum, where visitors could study its brushwork closely.
  4. It records how Tanner Street looked many years ago.

How to solve it

  1. Find the subject: a mural on the side of a hardware store.
  2. Find the judgment signals: "I think that visitor would be judging the wrong thing" and "That, I would argue, is the proper measure of public art."
  3. The claim is what paragraphs 3 and 4 argue: the mural succeeds by changing how people use the street.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. The author says the opposite about the figures: "Their hands are stiff, their faces are flat ovals." The skillful part is the brick and glass.
  • B. Correct. Paragraph 4 gives the measure: success depends on "whether it changes the way people use the space around it." Paragraph 3 shows that people now "linger."
  • C. Incorrect. The author contrasts a museum painting, which "asks to be studied," with a street painting, which "asks to be lived beside," and never suggests moving the mural.
  • D. Incorrect. The mural shows the street with figures who are "recognizable neighbors" going about "an ordinary morning"; nothing suggests it shows the past.

Worked example Medium

Show the whole passage

The Wall on Tanner Street

1For eleven years, the side of the hardware store on Tanner Street was a blank expanse of tan brick, notable only for a faded arrow pointing toward a parking lot that no longer existed. Then, over one wet spring, a painter named Odile Marsh covered it with a mural of the street itself: the same hardware store, the bakery across the road, the bus shelter, and dozens of small figures going about an ordinary morning. Many of the figures are recognizable neighbors. The man who sweeps the bakery steps is there, broom in hand, and so is the crossing guard, holding up a sign that reads, in tiny letters, "Slow Down, Look Up."

2As a piece of painting, the mural is uneven. Marsh handles brick and glass beautifully; the bakery window seems to hold real morning light. Her people are another matter. Their hands are stiff, their faces are flat ovals, and several of them seem to float an inch above the sidewalk. A visitor who judged the wall only by its technique would leave unimpressed.

3I think that visitor would be judging the wrong thing. The mural's real achievement is not on the wall but in front of it. Since it was finished, people stop. They hunt for themselves and their neighbors among the figures, they point, and they argue about whether the bus shelter is painted the right shade of green. The owner of the hardware store told me that strangers now ask him for directions they do not need, just to start a conversation about the painting. A street that people once hurried along has become a place where they linger.

4That, I would argue, is the proper measure of public art. A painting in a museum asks to be studied; a painting on a street asks to be lived beside. Its success depends less on how skillfully a face is rendered than on whether it changes the way people use the space around it. By that standard, the stiff hands and floating feet hardly matter. Marsh has made a wall that persuades a neighborhood to look at itself, and that is rarer than good brushwork.

5None of this means technique is unimportant. A clumsier painter might have produced a wall that people ignored. But Marsh seems to have understood which skills the job required: a sharp eye for the places everyone knew, and a willingness to put ordinary people where they could find themselves. The sign in the crossing guard's hand turns out to be good advice for anyone who walks by.

The main function of paragraph 2 is to:

  1. praise Marsh as the most talented painter in town
  2. explain, step by step, the methods Marsh used to paint the mural over one wet spring
  3. describe how residents reacted to the finished mural
  4. admit flaws in the mural's technique before arguing they matter lessAnswer

How to solve it

  1. Read paragraph 2 and the sentence right after it.
  2. Paragraph 2 lists weaknesses (stiff hands, flat faces); paragraph 3 opens, "I think that visitor would be judging the wrong thing."
  3. Name the job with a verb: paragraph 2 concedes a weakness that the author then sets aside.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. Paragraph 2 praises only her brick and glass; it calls the painting "uneven" and her people "another matter," and it compares her with no other painter.
  • B. Incorrect. Paragraph 2 judges the finished mural and says nothing about methods. "Over one wet spring" appears in paragraph 1, and only as a time.
  • C. Incorrect. Residents' reactions come in paragraph 3 ("people stop"). Paragraph 2 is about the painting itself.
  • D. Correct. Paragraph 2 concedes that the mural "is uneven" and that a visitor judging technique "would leave unimpressed." Paragraph 3 answers: "I think that visitor would be judging the wrong thing."

Trap Description mistaken for the claim

A choice can repeat the passage accurately and still be wrong for a main-claim question. "The mural shows the bakery and the bus shelter" is true, but it is something the author shows, not something the author argues. Before you pick a main-idea choice, ask whether it is a judgment the writer defends or only a detail the writer reports.