The SAT Prep Black Book(136)

You’ll find that the same handful of issues accounts for a majority of the question. Things will start to seem very repetitive after you practice a little bit. So let’s get started!





Unwritten Test Design Rules of Identifying Sentence Errors on the SAT


There are only a few rules for these questions that are worth pointing out, but they’re very important, so don’t forget them!





SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 1: No Style Points


For these questions, you should think ONLY about grammar—don’t worry about style at all. That means you can’t mark an answer choice just because you have a vague notion that there might be a better way to say it! Actually, there often IS a better way to say most of the things that appear in these questions, but your job is still only to find the things that are clearly grammatically wrong as far as the SAT is concerned.





SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 2: No Deletions Except In Rare Cases Of Redundancy


Sometimes you may be tempted to mark an answer choice because you think it should be deleted entirely.

You can’t just delete phrases because you don’t like them, though. You can only choose to delete an entire underlined phrase when the phrase is redundant. There aren’t usually a lot of questions that test redundancy—in the entire second edition of the College Board Blue Book, there’s only a handful of questions that test it. One of them is question 29 on page 535, which is discussed later in this book.

Let me repeat that, because it’s important: you can’t just mark an answer choice on this part of the test because you think it sounds weird. You can only mark it if you think it’s breaking an actual rule of SAT grammar.





SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 3: “He,” “She,” “It,” And “They” Must Always Be Replaceable Within A Sentence


If the College Board uses the words “he,” “she,” “it,” or “they” (or any form of those words, like “its” or “them”), then there MUST be a noun somewhere else in the sentence that indicates what that pronoun is referring to.

This rule might sound like it’s not that important, but students often choose wrong answers when they forget about it, because this rule actually means that many common English expressions would be wrong on the SAT.

Whenever you see the word “it,” there must be a phrase somewhere in the sentence that could be plugged in exactly in place of the word “it” in order to make the sentence work. For instance, this sentence would be fine:

This book says it was printed in 1934.

In that sentence, the phrase “this book” could be plugged in exactly where the word “it” is, and the sentence would still make perfect sense:

This book says this book was printed in 1934.

Similarly, if you have the word “they” in a sentence, there must be a plural phrase somewhere in the sentence that could be plugged in where the word “they” is. So this would be okay:

The dogs whimpered because they were hungry.

This works on the SAT because we could plug “the dogs” in where “they” is:

The dogs whimpered because the dogs were hungry.

But, as I mentioned earlier, the following sentence would NOT be okay on the SAT, even though it’s a normal English sentence:

*They said it would rain today.

There are no words or phrases in this sentence that could be plugged in directly for the words “they” and “it,” so the College Board would call this a grammatically incorrect sentence.

Make sure you keep this rule in mind, because test-takers forget it all the time. If you see the word “they” or the word “it” underlined, you have to make sure there’s a phrase somewhere in the sentence that can be plugged in exactly for that word. If there’s not, then the College Board will say the usage is incorrect.





SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 4: Verb Tenses Can Only Be Wrong If They’re Formed Wrong, Or If They’re Impossible


It’s possible for the tense of a verb to be grammatically incorrect on the SAT Writing section, but only in two situations.

oThe verb is conjugated incorrectly.

oThe verb creates an impossible situation when combined with other verbs in the sentence.

Let’s talk about incorrect conjugations first. Basically, you have to be on the lookout for sentences like this:

*My neighbor forgived me for being so loud.

In that case, the irregular verb “forgive” should have been used in its proper past-tense form, which is “forgave.”

The other way a verb can be incorrect is when it creates an impossible situation in the context of other verbs in the same sentence.