On many questions, though, more than one answer choice will be grammatically acceptable, and the shortest choice will not be among them, so you’ll need to consider a few other things.
3. Look for the 3 most important patterns in the answer choices that are grammatically acceptable: the length of the answer choice, the number of words ending in “-ed” or “-ing,” and the number of words that are less than 5 letters long.
Remember the rules for this section—we can only change things that are underlined, and we can only change them in the ways that appear in the answer choices! You have to focus on the underlined portion of the sentence. Without trying to rewrite it on your own, look for the patterns we frequently encounter on the Improving Sentences questions.
4. Determine which choice follows the most patterns.
Assuming that you’ve read correctly and that you’ve correctly eliminated the choices with bad SAT grammar, the correct answer choice will be the one that fits the most of the 3 hidden patterns we talked about for Improving Sentences questions.
5. Read the entire sentence with your favorite answer choice inserted in place of the underlined portion.
It’s important to remember that the correct answer needs to fit back in the sentence. Sometimes test-takers forget some key element of the sentence when they’ve been reading through the answer choices, and they don’t realize that an answer choice they like might actually create a grammatical problem when re-inserted in the sentence. So it’s always critical to consider the entire sentence again before marking an answer choice.
6. Re-examine all the other answer choices.
Remember—you never answer an SAT question without considering all the answer choices, and the Improving Sentences questions are no exception. When you look back through the other answer choices, you should be able to identify issues in those choices (whether grammatical or stylistic) that would prevent them from being correct on the SAT. If you don’t see anything wrong in one of the other answer choices, then you need to reconsider the question.
If you’ve done everything correctly up until this point, you should have one answer choice that is grammatically acceptable on the SAT and looks stylistically ideal, and four answer choices with identifiable issues that make them wrong, either because they’re grammatically unacceptable or because they don’t follow the style patterns as well as the choice that you like does.
7. Mark your answer or skip the question.
If you decide that one of the answer choices is clearly correct, then mark it with confidence and move on. If you can’t decide which answer choice is correct, consider skipping the question for the time being and returning to it later, so that you can move on and correctly answer questions that are easier for you to do.
Conclusion
You’ve now seen the entire process for Improving Sentences questions on the SAT Writing section. In the next section, I’ll show you the process in action against real SAT questions published by the College Board in the Blue Book!
The Step-By-Step Approach To Improving SAT Sentences In Action
To demonstrate how the Improving Sentences process works against real test questions, and to help you get a feel for the practical application of that process, I’ll go through all the Improving Sentences questions that start on page 407 of the first sample SAT that appears in the College Board’s Blue Book (the Official SAT Study Guide).
Page 407, Question 1
This is a question in which the underlined portion is very short, suggesting that the issue is likely to be grammatical, rather than stylistic. Sure enough, the correct form (“by falling”) indicates grammatically that the method by which the drivers cause accidents is “falling asleep.”
(A) is a run-on sentence.
(B) is a correctly punctuated compound sentence, but it’s not as short as (C).
(C) is correct.
(D) is grammatically incorrect—if we were going to use “and,” the following verb would need to be in the past tense to match “caused.”
(E) is also a run-on sentence.
Page 407, Question 2
In this question the underlined portion is longer, suggesting that the question might involve stylistic elements. The original has “is being,” something the College Board almost always dislikes. The correct form, (C), is also the shortest one, as we would frequently expect. Remember that when the shortest answer choice has no grammatical issues as far as the College Board is concerned, it will be the correct answer choice.
(A) doesn’t work because of “is being.”
(B) has a few different things wrong with it, but the biggest problem is the use of the word “is” in conjunction with the phrase “as a result of.”