VCE English

## What inference is A text almost never states everything it means. **Inferential reading** is the habit of working out what is implied: what a character feels but does not say, what a narrator is leaving out, what a writer wants the reader to conclude from an arrangement of events. The reader's conclusions have to rest on something in the text, so an inference is different from a guess. A useful test is whether another reader, shown the same words, could follow the path from the evidence to the conclusion. Take a short invented line: "Marguerite set two cups on the table, then put one back." Nothing in it says that someone has died, left or will not be coming. The reader infers loss from the small action, and from what the pairing of cups usually means in a household. The inference works because it begins with a detail, adds knowledge about how people live, and ends with a claim about meaning. Written out as a chain, it reads: detail, what the detail usually signals, what that suggests here. Several kinds of evidence support an inference, and a strong reader uses more than one at a time. - What a character does, including what they avoid doing. - What is said, and what is said badly, late or not at all. - Details of setting that act as a mood or a comment on a character. - The order in which events are told, and what is held back. - Repeated words, images or objects. - The difference between what a narrator claims and what the events show. ## Close reading **Close…