*Our neighbor from across the street with the loud dogs who spend all night barking want to know if we can watch her house while she’s away.
So when you read a sentence on the SAT Writing section, ignore these intervening phrases and focus on the core relationship in the sentence to make sure the appropriate words agree with one another. We’ll see several examples of this in a few pages when we look at solutions to real Blue Book questions.
(I realize this might be considered a grammatical rule—in fact, I even talk about it in the Writing Toolbox in the appendix. But it’s so important, and it comes up so often on these questions, that I thought it was worth mentioning separately here.)
Hidden Pattern 2: Singular vs Plural
By far, the largest broad issue that comes up on the Writing section is the distinction between the singular and plural forms of different kinds of words. This can come up in a lot of ways, and you should learn to keep a sharp eye out for all of them. The example I gave in Hidden Pattern 1 involved the singular and plural forms of a verb, but you might also see the singular word “it” used incorrectly to refer to a plural noun. You might even see an incorrect sentence that says something like, “My brother and my sister both want to be a dentist,” when the correct version would be “My brother and my sister both want to be dentists,” since two people can’t become a single dentist.
So keep your eyes open for these singular/plural mismatches. They’re all over the Writing section, and they can show up in a variety of ways.
Hidden Pattern 3: The Last Few Sentences Will Be Convoluted
The last few questions in the Identifying Sentence Errors section will involve the same kinds of issues that appear in the other Identifying Sentence Errors questions, but the word-order of these last few sentences is often pretty odd. So it’s important to pay careful attention to the relationships among nouns, adjectives, verbs, and the other parts of speech, to make sure that you’re not missing anything just because the words are in a bizarre order. When you’re checking out a sentence to see if a word or phrase is in the proper form, remember that you have to look both before and after the underlined phrase, because subjects might appear after verbs, or antecedents might appear after pronouns, and so on. (This is true for every sentence on the SAT Writing section, but it comes up most often on questions 25 - 29 of the big Writing sub-section.)
The Recommended Step-By-Step Approach For SAT Identifying Sentence Errors
This is the process I recommend you follow when you’re attacking SAT Identifying Sentence Errors questions.
1. Read the entire prompt sentence.
You need to be able to place the underlined portions of the sentence in their proper context, so you have to read the entire sentence before you do anything else.
2. Focus on the underlined portions of the prompt sentence.
Remember that only the underlined portions of the text can have something wrong with them—and, on top of that, only ONE underlined portion per sentence can be wrong. Remember, too, that we’re not just looking for phrases that you would change if you could, just to make things sound better in your opinion; we’re looking for phrases that specifically violate the College Board’s grammar rules.
3. Think about how each underlined word relates to the other words in the sentence. Consider drawing lines from each underlined word to the other words it is related to, if that helps you keep track.
This step will help you see the relationships among the various parts of the sentence. For example, if the pronoun “she” appears in an underlined portion of the sentence, you could draw a line connecting the word “she” with the noun that it’s referring to. Then draw another line connecting “she” with the verb that goes with it. If you want, you can use the basic grammatical concepts outlined in the appendix to see which words in a sentence are related to each other—for example, a pronoun is related to the noun (or nouns) that it stands for, and a verb is related to its subject. On the other hand, you can probably develop an instinct for these relationships just by reviewing and digesting the sample solutions in this Black Book.
4. Look for a word that doesn’t fit properly with the words it is supposed to be related to.
Now that we’ve identified all the relationships between underlined and non-underlined words in the sentence, we check all those relationships to find the one relationship where a word doesn’t fit the words it should be related to. For example, if the singular pronoun “she” is supposed to go with the underlined word “were,” then we know that “were” needs to be “was.”