The SAT Prep Black Book(133)

o3rd example paragraph: Repeat the previous step with your third example.

oConclusion: Start with a sentence or two relating all your examples back to the first sentence of your essay. Finish by rephrasing the first sentence of the essay. Pad this out, too ;)

As I said, this is not the only possible way to get a high score on your essay, but in my experience it's the easiest and most reliable. Just make sure it's long, and your examples support your position.

There’s probably no need to plan your essay, since you can make up whatever examples you want anyway. A lot of people don’t plan at all. They just make up each example as they come to it, and use the time they save so they can write more, because length is the primary indicator of the score.

Refer to the example essays in the Blue Book to see what high-scoring essays look like.





SAT Writing Multiple Choice


“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”

- Michel de Montaigne





Overview and Important Reminders for SAT Writing Multiple-Choice


The remaining three SAT question types are all part of the Writing Section of the SAT. We’ll get into the specifics of each question type in a minute, but first we need to clear up a few misconceptions that often keep people from doing as well on SAT Writing as they could.

Let’s get started.





The Big Secret(s) Of SAT Writing Multiple-Choice Questions


There are a lot of important things about this part of the SAT that you probably don’t know. We’ll start with the biggest one, which is that you may not even need to worry about the SAT Writing section at all.





Many Schools And Scholarship Programs Don’t Even Consider The Writing Section


The Writing section is a relative new-comer to the SAT, since it was only added to the test in 2005. (It has existed on the PSAT for longer than it has on the SAT, and there used to be an SAT Subject Test in Writing, but the Writing section as we know it on the SAT 1 has only existed since 2005.)

Many schools don’t like the SAT Writing section for a couple of reasons. The SAT Essay is widely thought to be a terrible measurement of writing ability, for one thing. And we also have to remember that the entire point of the SAT is to allow colleges to make meaningful comparisons among current applicants and the applicants from previous years; since colleges only have a few years of data from the Writing section, as opposed to decades of data for the other two sections, many schools trust the Writing scores a lot less than they trust the other two scores.

With each passing year, it stands to reason that more and more colleges will start to feel comfortable enough to trust the Writing section. Even now, it’s definitely trusted a lot more than it was when it debuted in 2005. Still, between the section’s relatively poor design (which we’ll talk about in the rest of this section) and the relative lack of historical data, I would expect that there will be plenty of schools that ignore the SAT Writing section for the foreseeable future.

If you’re wondering whether your target schools care about the Writing section, the best thing you can do is track down their admissions statistics on the Internet, or even call up the admissions office of each school and ask directly if they consider the SAT Writing section. You can do the same thing for any SAT-based scholarships you might be competing for. If it turns out that none of your target schools or programs cares about this part of the test, then you can focus even more intently on raising your scores in the other sections, and leave this part of the test alone.

Generally speaking, the larger state schools seem to be the ones that place less emphasis on the Writing section, though there are plenty of more selective private schools that also say they don’t care about it very much. And, just anecdotally, I can tell you that I’ve been called on by prestigious admissions consultants to help students raise their Reading and Math scores in a last-ditch effort to get them up before an application deadline, but no admissions professional has ever asked me to do that for a client’s Writing score, even when the client’s Writing score was only average.

Again, these things can change from year to year and from school to school, so you should always verify on your own whether your target schools will care about your Writing score. I just want you to be aware that many seem not to.





The SAT Writing Section Doesn’t Always Reflect The Way Anyone Actually Speaks


The approach that most people take to the Writing section is to trust the way a sentence sounds to them. If they think it sounds like something they would say, they’re happy. If not, they try to find a way to change it that would bring it more in line with how they talk.