Literary passages

What a literary passage is

A literary passage is a piece of creative writing: a poem or an extract from a story, essay, play or novel. The writer chooses words for their sound, feeling and images, not just for information.

What NCET asks

• The central idea or theme of the extract.
• The tone or mood: joyful, sad, ironic, nostalgic, angry, hopeful.
• Figures of speech: simile, metaphor, personification, alliteration, repetition and others used in Sindhi.
• What an image or a line suggests.
• The poet’s or writer’s attitude.

How to answer

• Read slowly, twice if it is a poem. Notice the words that carry feeling.
• Ask “What is being compared to what?” to spot similes and metaphors.
• For tone, look at word choice. “Crumbling”, “silent” and “empty” create a different mood from “bright”, “busy” and “warm”.
• The theme is usually broader than the subject: a poem about a tree may really be about patience or old age.

Common mistakes

• Taking figurative lines literally.
• Choosing a tone that matches one word instead of the whole passage.
• Mixing up the speaker of a poem with the poet.

Practice tip

Keep a small notebook of Sindhi figures of speech with one example of each from a poem or story you have read.