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VICEnglishQuick questions
Unit 3: Reading and creating texts
Quick questions on Vocabulary, text structures and language features: VCE English Unit 3 Area of Study 1
15short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is vocabulary?Show answer
Vocabulary is the lexical layer. The words the author chooses, the register they sit inside, the variation across characters and across the text.
What is text structures?Show answer
Text structures are the architectural decisions. The shape of the whole text, the order of its parts, the placement of weight.
What is language features?Show answer
Language features are the local stylistic moves. The sentence-level and paragraph-level features that build the texture.
What is diction?Show answer
The general level of vocabulary. Latinate against Anglo-Saxon. Formal against colloquial.
What is register?Show answer
The contextual level of formality. The same author may move between registers across the text (a public speech inside a private memoir, a legal document inside a domestic novel). Register shifts are visible craft choices.
What is connotation?Show answer
The implied meanings around a word. "Home" and "house" denote the same object; they carry different weights.
What is idiolect?Show answer
The vocabulary of a particular speaker. Dialogue that uses a consistent vocabulary across a text is the author building a voice through diction.
What is macro structure?Show answer
The whole-text shape. Linear chronology, dual timeline, frame narrative, choral rotation across narrators, fragmented vignettes. The macro structure is the author's first craft decision.
What is chapter and section breaks?Show answer
The places where the text chooses to break are structural decisions. A short chapter after three long ones is a deliberate shock; a section break inside a scene is a deliberate withholding.
What is sequencing?Show answer
The order in which information reaches the reader. A scene placed early gives the reader knowledge later scenes assume; a scene held back creates dramatic irony.
What is focalisation?Show answer
Whose consciousness the narration is anchored in. A shift in focalisation from one character to another is a structural choice that changes the reader's access.
What is imagery?Show answer
Language that addresses the senses. Visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory. Specify the sense and quote the phrase.
What is symbolism?Show answer
An object or image that carries meaning beyond its literal reference. Track the symbol across the text; symbolism works by repetition.
What is free indirect discourse?Show answer
Third-person narration that slides into the character's idiom without quotation marks. A signature feature of literary prose.
What is syntactic compression?Show answer
A sentence with the modifiers stripped away. Often the structural form of restraint, grief or refusal.