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The SAT Prep Black Book(134)



The problem with this should be obvious if you’ve been reading this book straight through from the beginning: the SAT doesn’t do much of anything the way regular people do it.

So we’ll find a bunch of arbitrary rules and patterns on the Writing section, just as we do on the other two sections. (Remember that being “arbitrary” isn’t the same thing as being “unpredictable” or “pointless.” When I say the rules are arbitrary, I mean that the College Board had to make some arbitrary decisions in setting up the rules that the Writing section would follow. But the rules are totally predictable and consistent from one test date to the next. They’re just not always based on the way educated people actually speak or write.)

For example, as we’ll see in a few pages, the College Board wouldn’t be okay with a sentence like this:

They said it was going to rain today.

This is a totally normal English sentence, but it breaks a certain SAT rule about the use of the pronouns “it” and “they.” I’ll cover that rule when we talk about Identifying Sentence Errors questions.

This next sentence would also not be acceptable on the SAT Writing section, even though it’s a perfectly grammatical English sentence:

My house is much bigger than John.

That sentence would break the SAT’s unwritten rule about comparisons needing to be made between similar things. Again, we’ll talk about that rule when we discuss the Identifying Sentence Errors questions.

For now, I just want to make it clear that there are specific test-design principles that SAT Writing questions must always follow, and those principles don’t always line up with our natural instincts as speakers of English.

And this talk of different question types brings me to my next big secret.





There Are Two Different Standards For Correct Sentences On The SAT Writing Section


Most test-takers assume that every question on the SAT Writing section follows the same standards. But this is not the case.

There are two major types of multiple-choice questions on the Writing section of the SAT: the Identifying Sentence Errors questions, which are numbers 12 through 29 on the large Writing sub-section in each SAT, and the Improving Sentences questions, which are numbers 1 through 11 on the large Writing sub-section and numbers 1 through 14 on the short sub-section at the end of the test. (There’s also a third question type that is basically a hodgepodge of the other two, with some ideas from the Passage-Based Reading questions thrown in as well. Those are the Improving Paragraphs questions, and they run from numbers 30 to 35 on the large Writing sub-section.)

The Identifying Sentence Errors questions only test your knowledge of the rules of SAT grammar. They test things like subject-verb agreement, the correct formation of irregular verb tenses, making sure you use “nor” with “neither,” and so on. But they don’t test the “awkwardness” of a sentence at all.

In other words, they only test whether the strict rules of grammar are being followed in the sentence; they don’t test whether the sentence could be expressed in a more pleasing way apart from its grammatical mistakes.

The Improving Sentences questions, on the other hand, do reward you for creating a sentence that is both grammatically acceptable and as pleasing to the College Board’s ear as possible. This means you will sometimes see Improving Sentences questions with more than one grammatically acceptable answer choice, and your job will be to choose the grammatically acceptable choice that also does the best job of following the SAT’s style guidelines. (These style guidelines are never spelled out by the SAT, but I’ve figured them out by looking at a whole bunch of real questions from the College Board and looking for patterns over the years. I’ll share them with you when we get to our discussion of the Improving Sentences questions a little later.)

So the Identifying Sentence Error questions are purely about SAT grammar, while the Improving Sentences questions combine SAT grammar and SAT style.

This means that some phrases that would be acceptable in correctly phrased Identifying Sentence Error questions are incorrect for the Improving Sentences questions. This can happen if the phrase is grammatically correct but still “awkward” in the eyes of the College Board.





Conclusion


Now that we’ve talked about some of the most important parts of the SAT Writing section that come as a surprise to most people, I’d like to explain how I think you should try to improve your score on this section. In some ways it’s a little different from what I recommend you do on the other two sections.





How To Improve Your Score On The Writing Section