TOEFL 2026 note
“You may want to consider” is not a suggestion
Academic English hides its instructions inside its politeness. A worked example from a TOEFL 2026 Reading task, and the two questions that stop you misreading it.
Read this the way you would read it on the day
Here is an email of the kind the 2026 Reading section is full of. Your supervisor, about a proposal you sent her.
There is no unfamiliar word in that email, no complex clause, nothing you would need a dictionary for. Most students still get it wrong — not because they misread a word, but because they read the sentence as an offer rather than an instruction.
The hedges do the opposite of what they look like
Count the softeners. I do wonder whether. Might be. A little. You may want to consider. Four pieces of hedging in two sentences. Read literally, nothing has been requested at all — your supervisor is merely musing.
The pattern worth learning
The more hedged the sentence, the less optional the thing inside it. Routine instructions get plain language, because nobody needs to manage your feelings about a routine instruction. The hedging appears when someone is asking for real work — a rewrite, a change of plan, an abandoned chapter — and is doing the social work of asking at the same time. The politeness is not decoration. It is compensation, and its size tells you the size of the request.
Why the wrong answers are so convincing
Items built on this pattern are difficult in a particular way: none of the wrong options are stupid. Faced with that email, all of these are things a reasonable, courteous student might do.
- Ask for a meeting to discuss the scope.
- Request an extension so the three-city version can be finished properly.
- Submit as planned, noting that the scope is ambitious.
- Narrow to one city and submit a revised proposal.
Three of those are defensible in the abstract. Only the last does the thing that was actually asked. That is the whole design of the task type — it does not test whether you are polite or sensible, it tests whether you understood the request underneath the politeness.
Two questions, in this order
- What is the verb? Strip every hedge out and see what survives as a plain imperative. “Narrow to one city.” That is the email; everything else is packaging.
- Who is paying the cost of the politeness? If the sender is doing the softening work, the sender is the one asking for something — even when the grammar says otherwise.
Knowing the pattern is not the same as catching it
You will finish this page able to explain the pattern, and still miss it on the day. That is not a failure of understanding; it is what recognition is. The email in front of you will be about a lab rota or a room booking, the hedging will sit in a different clause, and it will read as perfectly ordinary correspondence — because it is perfectly ordinary correspondence.
It also cannot be practised on textbook passages. Textbook English is written to be understood; this English is written to be diplomatic. Those are different jobs, and only one of them is on the test. You need real correspondence, several of them, with the misread named immediately after you make it — because the useful moment is the one where you were certain and wrong.
Play Arrivals →Real emails, the actual question, and an explanation of why each wrong read is wrong. Free, no card.On the numbers in this note
ETS notes that its 2026 specifications are “subject to minor revisions … until the official launch”. Not affiliated with ETS. TOEFL is a registered trademark of ETS.