Here’s what I mean by that. Each of these sentences has an acceptable verb tense by itself, because there are no other verbs in the sentence that could possibly interfere:
The tree fell over.
Lightning will strike the tree.
But this next sentence would be incorrect on the SAT Writing section, because it combines two verbs with two different tenses in an impossible way:
*The tree fell over when lightning will strike it.
The problem here is that the word “when” indicates that the two events in the sentence happened at the same time, but the word “fall” is in the past and the phrase “will strike” is in the future. Two events can’t happen at the same time if one of them was in the past and one of them will be in the future.
So unless a sentence contains a poorly formed conjugation or some kind of impossibility, then the verb tense in the sentence can’t be wrong.
SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 5: You Can Only Compare Similar Things, And Only In Similar Phrases
The multiple-choice questions on the SAT Writing section will only allow you to make comparisons between things of the same kind, and the ideas being compared need to be stated in similar ways.
Let’s start by talking about the first half of that rule: the idea that the SAT only lets us make comparisons between similar concepts.
For example, we’re not allowed to choose a sentence like this on the SAT:
*My house is bigger than John.
Even though this is a perfectly grammatical and logical sentence (because a house is typically bigger than a person), it would be incorrect on the multiple-choice portion of the SAT Writing section because it compares two things of different types. On this part of the test, we’d be allowed to compare a house to another house, or we could compare a person to a person, but we can’t compare a house to a person. So either of these sentences would be okay:
I am bigger than John.
My house is bigger than John’s house.
This means that you always need to be alert when two things are compared, so you can make sure they’re two things of the same type.
Now let’s talk about the second half of this rule, which is the idea that the things being compared need to be phrased in similar ways (many students refer to this as “parallelism”).
So, for instance, this would be an incorrect sentence on the SAT:
*There are more people living in Germany than Hawaii.
The College Board wouldn’t like that because “Germany” has the word “in” before it, but “Hawaii” doesn’t. So this would be one way to fix that problem:
There are more people living in Germany than in Hawaii.
By the way, you can often recognize that these issues might be relevant to a sentence when you see words like “more,” “less,” “than,” or “as” in the sentence, or words that end in -er, like this:
I am bigger than John.
I am as big as John.
SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 6: The SAT Tests Prepositional Idioms, But Rarely
The word “idiom” is used incorrectly by a lot of SAT tutors and websites to explain solutions to multiple-choice questions on the SAT Writing section. In fact, the College Board itself even misuses the word on its website to describe phrases that aren’t idioms.
Let me explain, because knowing what an idiom actually is will come in handy if you decide to go online for help with this part of the test (which is something I don’t recommend, but people do it anyway). Technically, an idiom is a phrase that doesn’t follow the broad rules of a language. It’s a phrase that you can only know and understand if you’ve encountered it before. But if you look at the College Board’s own explanations for SAT Writing questions on its SAT Question Of The Day web site, you’ll see that the College Board uses the word “idiomatic” to refer to almost any phrase it deems correct, even when that phrase follows rules that other phrases also follow. Which is just one more reason not to pay too much attention to the College Board’s explanations of SAT questions.
The reason I mention this is that the SAT does occasionally test your knowledge of idioms that involve prepositions. On average, you’ll see these kinds of questions a couple of times per test.
A prepositional idiom is a phrase that includes a particular preposition for no reason other than the fact that native speakers always use that phrase with that particular preposition. (A preposition is a short word like “in,” “on,” “to,” or “from.” For a full explanation of what a preposition is, see the Writing Toolbox in the appendix.)
For instance, it’s appropriate to say, “I listen to music,” but not to say “I listen towards music” or “I listen at music.” The preposition “to” is okay in that phrase, but the prepositions “towards” and “at” are not. We would call this phrase an idiom because there’s no general rule about the words “towards,” “to,” and “listen” that would have told us beforehand that “listen to” is okay but “listen towards” is not.