SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (52 page)

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:

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, f
or example:

This list of names takes a long time to read
.

T
he 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.

B
ecause 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:

*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.)

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.

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.)

This is the process I recommend you follow when you’re attacking SAT Identifying Sentence Errors questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Remember that not every sentence will contain an error. If you’ve considered all the underlined portions of the sentence and you haven’t found one that has an error, then mark (E) and go on to the next question.

Don’t forget that (E) will be the right answer as frequently, or infrequently, as it would in any other section; the SAT distributes correct answers randomly in every section. For more on that, see the discussion of SAT Misconception 6 in the section of this book called “8 Things You Thought You Knew About The SAT Are Wrong.”

Re-read the entire sentence to double-check yourself, and then mark the answer you think is right and move on.

We’ve just seen an entire approach to the Identifying Sentence Errors portion of the SAT Writing Section. Now, to show you that the process works,
and to help you build up your instincts for the Identifying Sentence Errors questions, we’ll try it out against actual SAT questions published by the College Board in the Blue Book. Let’s get started!

Now we’ll try our hand at some real SAT questions from the
Blue Book, which is the College Board publication
The
Official SAT Study Guide
. As you follow along with these explanations, remember that the goal is to build up your instincts for handling these kinds of questions.

(C) is wrong because two people can’t become one thing. A correct form would be “entomologists.” The College Board’s favorite issue to test, broadly speaking, is the difference between singular and plural phrases, so this is the kind of thing we want to get used to looking out for.

Nothing is grammatically wrong with this sentence, so (E) is the answer.

(A) is wrong because the form “badly” makes it sound like the casserole is doing a bad job of smelling—that is, it makes it sound like the casserole has a nose and isn’t using that nose very well. A correct form would be “surprisingly bad.” The College Board sometimes tests the difference between adjectives and adverbs, so whenever we see an adjective or an adverb underlined we have to make sure it’s the appropriate form. (For a thorough explanation of the difference between adjectives and adverbs, check out the Writing Toolbox in the appendix of this book.)

(C) doesn’t work because the word “whenever” indicates that the verb “learned” and the verb in (C) need to be the same tense. A correct form for (C) would be “sought out” or “would seek out.” Remember that we can only say a verb tense is wrong when the given tense makes the sentence logically impossible, as it does here.

(D) is wrong because in a situation like this we would have to say “thought it wise to suppress.”

(C) is the grammatical flaw in this sentence because it needs to be an adverbial form, because it’s modifying the verb “has risen.” A correct form would be “noticeably.” This is basically the same issue we just saw in question 14 from this page, except that in 14 the adverb needed to be an adjective, and in this question the adjective needs to be an adverb.

(A) needs to be “nor,” to match “neither.” The issues of “neither + nor” and “either + or” are probably the most basic and easily identified issues on the entire SAT, but for some reason test-takers miss them frequently, usually because they don’t read the question carefully enough. This is just one more example of how important it is to read EVERYTHING carefully.

(C) is wrong because “his or her” needs to be “their” in order to match the plural “passengers.” Again, the single most frequently tested issue is the difference between singular and plural phrases, and it’s something we always have to look out for.

Nothing is grammatically wrong with this, so (E) is the correct answer. Some students like to choose (B) because they think “or older” should be “and older,” but a single person can’t be both 65
and
older than 65; he can only be either 65
or
older, so (B) is okay the way it is.

This one contains a bad comparison: on the SAT, we either have to compare painters to painters or we have to compare paintings to paintings. We can’t compare paint
ings
to paint
ers
. So a correct form for choice (B) might be “to the paintings of Rauschenberg.” Whenever you see a question on the Writing section of the SAT that involves comparing two things, you should check to make sure the two things are of the same type.

A lot of students don’t like the way this sentence is written, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it, so the answer is (E).

Most people who miss this choose (C)
incorrectly, but “at too great a distance” is an acceptable phrase, because it doesn’t break any rules:

o
“distance” is a noun

o
“great” is an adjective, so it can be used to describe a noun

o
“too” is an adverb, so it can be used to describe the adjective “great”

o
“at” is an appropriate preposition for the word “distance”

This one is a good example of how important it is to remember that we’re only concerned with
SAT grammar for Identifying Sentence Errors questions; it doesn’t matter if we think we could rephrase the sentence in a way that would be more stylistically pleasing.

For this one, (C) is the problem because “is released” needs to be “are released” in order to agree with “spears,” which is plural. Once more we see that the College Board is trying to get us to overlook a mis-match between singular and plural phrases. Remember how repetitive the SAT is, and how important it is to read everything carefully!

A lot of test-takers think something is wrong with this sentence, but if we read it carefully we’ll see that everything in it is actually okay, so (E) is the answer. Test-takers are often worried about (D) being in the passive voice, but the College Board doesn’t consider the passive voice to be a grammatical mistake, as this question (along with many others) clearly demonstrates.

The correct phrase should be “capable of distinguishing,” so (C) is the mistake here. This question is an example of the kind of prepositional idiom that the College Board occasionally tests. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can learn from this question, because it’s unlikely that the College Board will revisit this particular idiom when you take the test for real, since there are thousands of prepositional idioms and different ones show up on each test.

Though most people would say a sentence like this in real life and not think twice about it, the word “their” is plural, which doesn’t work because the town’s name is technically singular. A correct phrase would be “its residents,” so (D) is the mistake. This is one more case of the College Board hoping you won’t notice a mismatch between singular and plural phrases. It’s also a good example of how a sentence can be incorrect on the SAT even though it would seem perfectly normal to an educated speaker of English in real life.

Nothing is wrong with this sentence, though students often think there is. The phrase “long since forgotten” is acceptable, and the phrase “crafted by artisans” is also okay, even though it’s in the passive voice, because the College Board doesn’t consider the passive voice to be a grammatical problem. (E) is the correct answer.

Here, the word “requires” should be “require,” in order to agree with “grades,” so (D) is the answer. This is another example of the College Board hoping you won’t notice that a singular verb has been paired with a plural subject.

The problem with the original version of the sentence is that it compares a “story” to a person, “Hank Aaron.” Remember that the College Board requires us to compare stories to stories or people to people, but it doesn’t let us compare stories to people, so (D) is the mistake. A correct form might have been “than the story of baseball’s great hitter,” because then we’d be comparing one story to another story.

As you can see, the key to doing well on these Identifying Sentence Errors questions is to train yourself to look for the same handful of grammatical issues over and over in a variety of settings. It’s also very important to think only in terms of actual rules being broken, rather than in general terms of “awkwardness,” because the critical issue in any question is going to be a specific rule of SAT grammar, not a loosely defined concept like awkwardness.

If you’d like to see videos of some sample solutions like the ones in this book, please visit
http://www.SATprepVideos.com
.
A selection of free videos is available for readers of this book.