Why you'll never score above 650 on SAT Improving Sentences
Improving Sentences is the most common question type on the SAT Writing section, but students often lose crucial points by relying on what sounds best to pick the right answer. Because these questions ask you to pick an answer choice that produces the "best sentence," it's easy to default to picking the sentence that has the best ring to your ear.
This strategy is alluring because it actually produces pretty good results. Our experience is that native English speaking students can often get to a 600 with this approach. Students that have had strong educations in formal grammar can reach as high as 650. The problem is that their score improvement tops out there and never improves.
The reason it is difficult to push past that 600-650 ceiling, is because using your ear is a great strategy for the easy questions. Those questions are designed so that the right answer sounds right. But the hard questions are designed in exactly the opposite way. The reason hard questions are hard is because the right answer doesn't sound right. There are several rules of grammar we simply don't use that often in common speech, and the SAT knows exactly how to exploit those rules.
For students with some grammar training, we find the following approach (combined with some training in common rules) helps students break the addiction to their ears.
- Read the Sentence first
- The importance of this one can't be overstated.
- Before looking at the answers, try to identify the error or error category
- For many students, simply covering up the answers with their hand is enough. It's okay not to be able to find the error, but you should try your darndest.
- Eliminate answer choices that don’t fix the initial error
- This is a quick way to narrow down your choices.
- For example, If the error is a pronoun error, you can just cross off all the choices that don't fix the pronoun
- Eliminate answer choices that fix the initial error, but introduce a new error
- Here's another place that students tend to trip up. Just because you've found the original error and identified a choice that fixes it, doesn't mean you've gotten to the correct answer.
- If and only if you still have multiple answer choices left, chose the choice with the least awkwardness
- Here's where your ear can be really helpful. Even if you are missing some other error, if you've been disciplined about eliminating choices, your ear can be a great last resort to get yourself to the right answer.
N.B. Remember that if you cannot find an error in the initial sentence, it might be that there is No Error in that sentence. In that case, carefully try to find an error introduced by each answer choice. It takes a little longer, but that why No Error questions are tricky.
Photo courtesy: Steve Snodgrass
