Most people try to improve on the Writing section by memorizing a lot of grammatical rules and then looking for opportunities to apply them to the test.
This doesn’t work, for reasons we just discussed. For one thing, the rules of “SAT grammar” aren’t always the same as the normal rules of grammar that you might learn from an English teacher or find on the Internet. For another thing, we have to keep in mind that different question types on the Writing section reward different things: some are only concerned with SAT grammar, while others rely on SAT grammar and SAT style together.
So I usually advise my students to learn what the SAT rewards on the Writing section by becoming very familiar with real SAT Writing questions written by the College Board, which we can find in the Blue Book. If you work with those real questions and pay attention to the principles of SAT grammar and style that I share with you in this book, you’ll quickly develop strong instincts about what the College Board rewards and punishes on this part of the test.
I used the word “instinct” in that last sentence very deliberately, because over the years I’ve seen that most test-takers aren’t very familiar with formal English grammar. This is especially true for native speakers of American English, because most American schools don’t teach grammar. For most American students, the only grammar they’ve ever formally studied is the grammar of the foreign language they take, and that grammar may not bear much resemblance to English grammar.
I don’t think it’s important to develop any technical knowledge of the names of different parts of speech, different semantic roles, and so on. The Writing section is different from the Math section in this regard. The Math section will use technical math words like “hypotenuse” or “integer” in its questions, so you need to know those words if you want to score high. But the Writing section never asks you to identify a helping verb or subordinating conjunction by name, so we don’t actually have to know any of that jargon to be able to identify correct answers consistently.
In other words, if you can tell that a particular phrase on the Writing section is something that the College Board won’t like, because similar phrases have always been wrong in the questions you’ve analyzed in the past, then it doesn’t matter what label you would put on the mistake.
As an example, I often work with students who use the word “parallelism” to refer to a wide variety of situations—everything from normal subject-verb agreement (which isn’t really an instance of parallelism) to a properly formed corollary conjunction (which is kind-of-maybe parallelism). But as long as their understanding of parallelism lets them answer questions correctly, nothing else matters as far as the SAT is concerned.
Conclusion
Instead of trying to learn formal English grammar, I would advise you to try to develop the right instincts for this section, without worrying about identifying and classifying different types of phrases.
You can develop those instincts by reading the rest of this section, paying attention to the rules and patterns I explain, and to the sample solutions I provide. If you take those things to heart and then try your hand at some practice questions from the Blue Book on your own, you should see improvement. The more questions you encounter and the more you practice implementing the ideas in this book, the higher your score will go.
Of course, if you would like a formal explanation of SAT grammar that uses words like “gerund” and “copular,” you can find my Writing Toolbox as an appendix at the end of this book. It gives you a formal explanation of all the points of SAT grammar. But you’ll probably find that you don’t need it.
Now let’s dive into the question types on the Writing section in more detail. We’ll start with the Identifying Sentence Error questions.
Overview and Important Reminders for Identifying Sentence Errors On The SAT
Like the rest of the Writing questions, the Identifying Sentence Errors questions on the SAT test a limited number of concepts over and over. But, as I mentioned earlier, these questions are purely about SAT grammar, with no consideration of style. These questions are also unique in that they don’t ask you to rephrase anything—they’re only interested in your ability to identify bad SAT grammar. You don’t have to worry about fixing any of the problems you see.
Each of these questions will present you with a single sentence. Several of the words and phrases in the sentence will be underlined. Your job is to find the part of the sentence that contains an error according to the SAT’s idea of grammar. If any one of the underlined portions of the sentence contains something that the SAT considers to be bad grammar, you’re going to mark it as the correct answer choice. If nothing is grammatically wrong with the sentence according to the College Board’s rules of grammar, you’ll mark (E).