The SAT Prep Black Book(138)

Contrast this situation with a rule-governed process like a verb conjugation. When we conjugate a verb, we know that there are broad rules that are applied to different classes of verbs to generate verb forms with predictable endings. The College Board (along with other sources) sometimes refers to a correctly conjugated regular verb as “idiomatic,” but such situations don’t involve idioms at all; they involve rules. Keep this in mind if you decide to read the College Board’s explanations for some SAT Writing questions, or you might accidentally end up thinking that almost every question involves an unpredictable idiom.

But let’s get back to our prepositional idioms like “listen to.” A few times per test, the College Board may include a Writing question with an underlined preposition, and the underlined preposition may be inappropriate because it doesn’t fit with an idiom that the College Board thinks you should know.

So you should be aware that these types of mistakes can appear on the test as errors that you need to correct. The rough part for us test-takers is that there are thousands and thousands of prepositional idioms, so you can’t really try to memorize them all—and even if you wanted to, I have no idea where you would find a complete list of them.

But the good news is that you don’t have to worry about the prepositions on every single question, because there can only be one error per question, and in many cases you’ll realize there’s some other error in the sentence that has nothing to do with any prepositions. You only need to pay attention to underlined prepositions if you can’t find any other errors in a sentence.

In that case, if a preposition feels a little weird to you, then you may want to mark it as the error for the sentence. As you practice, keep track of how accurate your instincts are with these prepositional idioms. Some people are very good at noticing them, and some aren’t. If you’re not, then you may want to err on the side of choosing (E) or omitting questions when you’re not sure if a preposition is incorrect.

As I mentioned before, there won’t be more than a few questions like this, at most, on any given test. So the damage from these questions will be limited, even if you never answer a single one correctly. But that only makes it all the more important that you focus on every question and make sure you don’t make any “careless” mistakes on other questions.





SAT Identifying Sentence Errors Rule 7: No Substitute For “And”


The College Board never lets you substitute a phrase like “in addition to” or “as well as” for the word “and.” So if you’re looking at an answer choice that says something like “I like pizza, hot dogs, as well as sushi,” that choice is wrong on the SAT, because the SAT wants you to use the word “and” instead of “as well as.”





Hidden Test Design Patterns of Identifying Sentence Errors on the SAT


Just like every other question on the SAT, the Identifying Sentence Errors questions have patterns that will make it easier to find the right answer. Here they are:





Hidden Pattern 1: The Intervening Phrase


Very often on these questions, you’ll see that a descriptive phrase comes between a noun and its verb. Instead of agreeing with the correct word, the verb might incorrectly agree with something in the descriptive phrase. A lot of students miss these questions because the verb does agree with the noun that’s closest to it—the issue is that it doesn’t matter how close together two words are in a sentence. Never forget that a verb has to agree with the thing that’s actually doing the action.

Consider the following sentence, for example:

This list of names takes a long time to read.

The intervening phrase here is “of names,” and the word “takes” agrees with “list,” so that the core part of the sentence would be “This list takes.” The phrase “of names” is just a way to describe the list. So it would be wrong to say it this way:

*This list of names take a long time to read.

Because then you’d be making “take” agree with “names,” as though the core of the sentence were something like “names take.”

Here’s another sentence where the intervening phrase is longer:

Our neighbor from across the street with the loud dogs who spend all night barking wants to know if we can watch her house while she’s away.

The core of this sentence is “neighbor wants,” but the phrase “from across the street with the loud dogs who spend all night barking” is inserted between the words “neighbor” and “wants.” It would have been wrong to write the sentence this way: