RC Author's Attitude questions: reading tone without overreading it

An Attitude question asks how the author regards something — a theory, a group, a piece of evidence, a proposal. Stems read "the author's attitude toward … can best be described as" or ask about the author's stance.

The register is narrower than you think

Passages on this exam are drawn from academic and journalistic writing, where authors hedge. So the credited answer is very often something like "cautious approval", "qualified skepticism", or "measured interest" — and rarely "enthusiastic endorsement" or "outright contempt".

Extreme answers are the standard trap here. If a choice contains "complete", "unqualified", "dismissive", "hostile", or "reverent", it is usually describing a passage more emotional than the one you read. Not always — a genuinely critical author exists — but the burden is on the passage to have earned it.

Attitude lives in adjectives and verbs

The signal is rarely a sentence saying what the author thinks. It is word choice: calling an argument "ingenious" versus "convenient", evidence "compelling" versus "suggestive", a conclusion "established" versus "asserted". Two or three of those, pointing the same direction, are what the answer rests on.

Concessions are especially informative. An author who spends a paragraph on a theory's strengths and then says "yet the mechanism remains unexplained" has told you where they stand — the pivot is doing the work, not the paragraph before it.

Whose attitude?

Half the wrong answers on this type describe an attitude accurately — belonging to someone else in the passage. A passage explaining why critics find a policy naive is not itself calling the policy naive. Before choosing, confirm the words you are relying on are the author's own and not part of a reported view.

• Too extreme in either direction. The most common failure.
• Somebody else's attitude, correctly described.
• Neutral where the passage was not. Authors who select a topic and structure an argument about it usually have a position; pure neutrality is possible but is not the default.
• Internally split. Answers pairing two incompatible stances, one of which fits — "admiration and alarm" where only alarm is supported.
• Attitude toward the wrong object. Right feeling, aimed at a different thing in the passage than the question named.