SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (54 page)

In this question, “are” needs to be “were” in order to match the past-tense verb phrases “were watching” and “feared” in the rest of the sentence.
So (D) is the correct answer.

We know that the verbs’ tenses need to match in this question because the phrase “just when” indicates that all the verbs are happening at the same time. Remember that verb phrases on the SAT
Writing section can’t create situations that are logically impossible.

The College Board only lets us use “she” or “he” when the word is clearly referring to a singular noun phrase somewhere in the sentence. In this case, “she” could refer either to the manager or to Ms. Andrews, so it’s not okay, and (C) is the correct answer.

Once more, we have a sentence in which the College Board switches from the plural to the singular—as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, this is the College Board’s favorite mistake to test. In this case, the word “they” is plural but the phrase “a candidate” is singular. We would need to change “a candidate” to “candidates” in order to make this acceptable to the College Board, so (A) is correct.

We’ve now seen how to handle the Identifying Sentence Errors questions on the SAT Writing Section. We’ve learned all about the rules, patterns, and processes for these questions, and we’ve seen real solutions worked out to real SAT questions
published by the College Board in the Blue Book.

As is the case with every other question type on the SAT, the more you work with these questions, the better you’ll be able to answer them!

The following page offers a brief summary of the major ideas for these Identifying Sentence Errors question. After that, we’ll move on to the questions that deal with both SAT grammar and SAT style: the Improving Sentences questions.

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.

This is a one-page summary of the major relevant concepts
for Identifying Sentence Errors questions. Use it to evaluate your comprehension or jog your memory. For a more in-depth treatment of these ideas, see the rest of the section.

The Big Secret:
Awkwardness doesn’t matter.
All that matters are the rules of “SAT grammar.”
SAT grammar is often similar to the way people talk but differs in certain ways.

Rules and patterns:

You can pick up the f
ine points of SAT grammar by going through the Blue Book solutions in this Black Book, or by reading the appendix in this Black Book. Apart from those, here are the rules and patterns unique to ISE questions:

o
Style doesn't count.
You can only pick something if it actually breaks a rule, not just because you think you could make it sound better.

o
You can't pick an underlined phrase because you think the
whole phrase
should be deleted, except in cases of redundancy (which are rare on the SAT).

o
You’ll often see unnecessary descriptive phrases inserted between two words that should agree.

o
The issue of “singular vs plural” is the single most commonly tested concept.

o
Questions 25 - 29 or so tend to be more convoluted than the other questions.

o
Comparisons can only be made between similar things, and only in similar ways.

o
No substitutes for the word “and”
(you can’t use “with,” “in addition to,” “as well as,” and so on).

o
Verb tenses can only be wrong if they’re misconjugated or impossible in context.

o
Prepositional idioms might be tested a couple of times
or so. Only an issue for questions with no other errors.

Here's the Identifying Sentence Errors process:

o
Read entire prompt sentence.

o
Focus on underlined portions of prompt sentence.

o
Think about how each word in the underlined portions relates to other words in the sentence (draw lines if it helps).

o
Look for an underlined word that doesn't agree with a word it's related to.

o
Consider that there might be nothing wrong with the sentence.

o
Re-read the sentence and mark your answer. Remember there must be a broken SAT grammar rule.

For examples of these concepts in action, see the sample Blue Book solutions in this Black Book.

The Improving Sentences questions on the SAT Writing section are relatively straightforward and repetitive once you develop a feel for the rules and patterns we’ll talk about in the next couple of pages. Each question presents you with a sentence that has an underlined word or phrase. The answer choices then provide you with several possible versions of the underlined portion of the prompt sentence. Your job is to choose the version of the underlined phrase that fits best according to the College Board’s ideas of grammar and style.

Don’t worry! You’ll find that these questions test a fairly limited number of concepts, and—like everything else on the SAT—you’ll be able to answer them pretty mechanically with a little practice. Let’s get started.

We don’t need to talk about that many rules for these questions, because there’s very little variation from ques
tion to question. Here are the 4 rules you’ll need.

I mentioned earlier that the Improving Sentences part of the SAT Writing section involves some stylistic considerations, while the Identifying Sentence Error
s questions only test SAT grammar. That’s still true, but it’s important to remember that the Improving Sentences questions ALSO test grammar in addition to style.

The correct answer to every single Improving Sentences question will always follow the grammar rules on the SAT. So you
can always feel safe eliminating an answer choice that is grammatically incorrect according to the College Board.

Sometimes you’ll have Improving Sentences questions in which two or more answer choices would be grammatically acceptable
, in the sense that none of them breaks a rule of SAT grammar. In these cases, you have to pick the choice that is the most stylistically acceptable to the College Board.

In other words, sometimes the difference between a wrong answer choice and a correct answer choice is an issue of
knowing which one just “feels” better to the College Board.

This might upset you at first—how are you supposed to know what the SAT thinks is good writing style? Don’t worry. The stylistic choices that the College Board prefers may have been originally chosen in an arbitrary way, but they have to be consistent from test to test just like every
other part of the SAT. That’s what makes the test standardized, after all.

In a couple of pages, I’ll give you a list of 3 style patterns that the College Board rewards on the Improving Sentences questions. All you need to do is pick the answer choice that is grammatically correct and does the best job of following those patterns.

Don’t worry if that sounds a little weird or intimidating. The patterns are pretty easy to apply, and we’ll see plenty of examples of solutions that use them when we look at some questions from the Blue Book later on.

By the way, style is more likely to be an issue in the answer choices when the underlined portion is longer than 4 words. When the underlined portion is under 5 words long, the question will typically (but not always) be purely grammar-based, which means that there will probably be only one answer choice that is grammatically acceptable. Of course, any time a question only has one grammatically acceptable answer choice, that choice is the right answer because of Rule 1.

The correct answer choice must do more than fix any mistakes in the underlined portion of the prompt sentence—it also has to avoid creating new mistakes.

Sometimes students zero-in on a problem in the prompt sentence and then choose the first answer choice that gets rid of that particular problem. But this isn’t good enough! The correct answer choice must not have ANY mistakes. So it’s important to consider each answer choice in its entirety before settling on an answer.

This isn’t really worth mentioning from a strategic perspective, but it’s probably still worth pointing out—the first answer choice in each Improving Sentences question is an exact restatement of the underlined portion of the prompt sentence.

I thought I should mention this just in case, because some students skip the instructions to each section and get confused when they can’t see a difference between the prompt sentence and choice (A).

Combining an awareness of
SAT grammar with an understanding of the following patterns will allow you to answer all the Improving Sentences questions that you’ll ever see on a real SAT. (Of course, you’ll have to read questions and their answer choices carefully in order to apply those ideas.)

In some cases, more than one answer choice will satisfy
one of the patterns below. If that happens, the answer choice that satisfies the most patterns will be the right one. We’ll see a lot of examples of how this works when we look at some solutions to Blue Book questions in a few pages.

The correct answer choice for SAT Improving Sentences questions is very often the shortest answer choice. (This is probably because the best way to fix the kinds of stylistic errors that appear on these questions is usually to cut things out.)

When the correct answer choice is NOT the shortest one, it’s very often the longest one. This is because the other common way to fix the kinds of errors that appear in this section is to add words and phrases.

This is NOT the same thing as saying that you should always pick the shortest or longest answer. That would be an idiotic thing for me to say. All I’m saying is that the correct answer is very often the shortest or longest answer choice. Knowing this helps us start to take apart the Improving Sentences questions, because it calls our attention to the fact that the best solutions to these questions often involve cutting as much as possible from, or adding as much as possible to, the given sentence.

This pattern is very powerful, and it’s important for us not to forget it. In fact, if the shortest answer choice is grammatically correct (according to the SAT’s idea of correct grammar), then it’s always the right answer.

By the way, when I refer to the shortest answer choice I’m talking about the choice that takes up the least linear space on the page, not necessarily about the choice that has the fewest words. In other words, I’m talking about the answer choice that would be shortest if you measured all the choices with a ruler.

One of the College Board’s favorite ways to make an answer choice stylistically undesir
able is to introduce participles or gerunds where they don’t need to exist. So we’ll often find that the answer choice with the fewest of those types of words is the correct one.

Those words are easy to identify in English because they tend to end in “-ed” or “-ing.”

Be especially careful around the words “being” and “having,” as those are often found in incorrect answer choices. (Of course, it’s possible for an answer choice to be correct while having either of those words in it, so I’m not saying you should automatically eliminate any answer choice that has them. I’m just saying that, in general, those words tend to indicate that a choice is incorrect.)

In order to make its wrong answers longer and more awkward, the College Board often has to insert
things like prepositions, conjunctions, relative pronouns, regular pronouns, helping verbs, and so on. You could spend a lot of time learning about all of these grammatical categories if you wanted . . . or you could just exploit the happy coincidence that, in English, these words are typically less than 5 letters long.

The correct answers, then, will tend to have the fewest words that are less than 5 letters long—the fewest words like “of,” “as,” that,”
“and,” “to,” “it,” “have,” “by,” and so on.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the correct answer will never contain any of these words. I’m saying that if you have one answer choice with only 3 words like this, and all the other choices have 5 short words, then, all else being equal, we’d expect the choice with only 3 short words to be the right answer.

We’ll often find that phrases from the correct answer to a question are repeated in some of the incorrect answers
, because the College Board wants to trick you. This means that you can often get an idea of which elements of an answer choice are likely to be correct by seeing which ones are repeated more throughout the answer choices. As an example, imagine a questions where 3 of the 5 answer choices begin with the word “but,” and 3 out of the 5 end with the word “always.” All other things being equal, we would expect the correct answer choice to begin with the word “but” and to end with the word “always.”

You may remember that the answer choices in certain SAT Math questions feature similar patterns, and for similar reasons. Just like in the Math section, it’s important to remember that I’m NOT saying that an answer choice will ALWAYS be correct if it includes all the most popular phrases from the other choices. I’m just saying that this happens very often, and it’s something we should be aware of as we work on Improving Sentences questions.