One of the first discoveries many students make when they begin preparing for the CLT is the exam’s author bank. If your education has consisted primarily of contemporary literature or standard public-school anthologies, the author bank can be jarring. Even students who consider themselves strong readers often find themselves scrolling through the list and realizing that they recognize only a handful of the names.
Take a glance:
And that’s just the first half.
If you’re looking at this list of authors for the first time, it’s entirely understandable if your first impulse is to grow an ulcer.
The readings favored by the CLT are not only unfamiliar to many students, they also tend to be in a difficult style. This is for multiple reasons. First, quite a few of these authors were not writing in English.
Take an author such as the Jewish historian Josephus writing in Rome during the late first century. Josephus was writing in Greek, but that was not even his native language in the first place. Fortunately, the CLT won’t ask you to translate Josephus’ Greek, but it could ask you to make sense of an older English translation that looks very archaic or “old-timey” to a high schooler in the twenty-first century.
Another challenge is that the content in many of these authors can seem strange or even bizarre to contemporary readers. If you’re not steeped in Christian theology and imagery, the writings of an Origen or a Julian of Norwich could seem very odd indeed. Alternatively, an author might be discussing a technical theme or topic in a way that assumes a high degree of familiarity. A passage from Copernicus, for instance, might have originally assumed that readers were up to speed on late medieval cosmological theories.
Now, students who have spent years in classical schools or homeschool programs built around the Great Books naturally have a little more familiarity with these kinds of writing. Students whose education has followed a different path, however, can easily conclude that they are beginning the race several steps behind.
Fortunately, that conclusion is mostly mistaken.
The fact is that no student should be overly intimidated by the CLT’s author bank.
Let’s do a little level-setting: even among well-educated adults—including professors, attorneys, physicians, or college graduates who themselves attended classical schools—it is rare to find someone who has read even a majority of the authors appearing in the bank. A liberal education is broad by definition but not exhaustive.
The reason this lack of familiarity is not especially damaging is that the CLT is not, in the final analysis, an examination looking for literary acquaintance. It is an examination of reading ability.
The CLT does not presume that every successful student has already read the Great Books exhaustively or even thoroughly. Remember, by their very nature, standardized tests are not knowledge tests. That means the CLT has strong incentives to reduce the points of friction we just mentioned: the test wouldn’t tell colleges anything useful if only 5-10% of takers can get most of the questions right in one section.
Verbal Reasoning passages serve as the medium through which the test measures whether students can follow an argument, recognize an author’s purpose, infer the meaning of unfamiliar words from context, distinguish central claims from supporting evidence, and trace the logical movement. Those abilities do not suddenly disappear because the author’s name happens to be Homer rather than David Foster Wallace, or because the passage was translated in 1893 rather than 1993.
In fact, unfamiliarity can even be an advantage rather than an obstacle, for a student who has already memorized the plot of The Odyssey or the arguments of C. S. Lewis may be tempted to answer questions from recollection rather than from attentive reading. An unfamiliar passage removes that temptation and asks the more important question: can you understand an intelligent piece of writing that you have never seen before?
That, after all, is precisely what college professors ask their students to do weekly.
If you as an enterprising student are tempted to sit down and begin systematically reading through the author bank: do not, at least not as preparation for the CLT.
That said, the author bank can offer an excellent source of preparation, provided that one approaches it with the proper strategy. Because no one knows which authors or passages will appear on a particular administration of the exam, reading practice should not be used as an exercise in prediction but as an opportunity to strengthen the habits that good readers already possess.
One practical strategy is to select several authors from the bank and seek out nineteenth- or early twentieth-century English translations rather than recent editions, since those older translations generally resemble the prose style that students are more likely to encounter on the exam.
Rather than attempting to master an entire work, read passages of approximately 500 to 650 words, paying close attention to how the author develops an argument, qualifies a claim, or shifts from one idea to another. When you finish, resist the temptation to ask whether you enjoyed the passage; ask instead whether you could accurately explain its central claim, reconstruct its organization, and account for the function of each paragraph. As you begin building up your reading comprehension with this exercise, start timing yourself.
If you cultivate those habits consistently, you will be practicing under conditions that are, in many respects, more demanding than the examination itself. Classical literature rendered into slightly archaic English presents some of the most challenging prose a high school student is likely to encounter, and there is considerable comfort in knowing that, if you can navigate those passages efficiently, relatively little on the CLT will truly feel outlandish.
Still looking for more? If you prefer a more structured approach, you don’t need to prepare alone. At Classic Test Prep, you can take our diagnostic, which will evaluate your abilities and suggest where you should focus your attention. From there, take our free study guides in the Verbal Reasoning. This will give you a realistic perspective of where you stand.
