SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (57 page)

Many test-takers accidentally choose (A) on this question,
because it seems to make a strong sentence.

But we always have to remember to consider each answer choice and make sure we can find something wrong with the choices we’re not picking! That’s the only way to be sure you’re not making any mistakes.

In this case, (D) is the shortest answer choice and has no grammatical mistakes. That means the College Board will say (D) is the right answer.

(Notice also that (D) includes the passive voice construction “is highly motivated,” but it’s still correct.)

If we read the answer choices carefully, we’ll see that only choice (C) is grammatically acceptable. (A) doesn’t work for a couple of reasons, but the most obvious is that the word “their” is referring to the singular noun “literature.” (B) doesn’t work because “direct” and “fresh” need to be in their adverb forms in order to modify the word “speaking.” (D) has the same problem as (B). And (E) uses “they,” just like (A) does.

Test-takers often miss this question, and questions like it, because they get caught up in what sounds best to them rather than sticking to the simple and repeatable rules of SAT grammar.

This is a question that most test-takers would be well advised to skip, because most of them won’t be able to arrive at a single answer choice that seems to follow all the rules and patterns the College Board likes.

The reason they won’t be able to reach a solid conclusion on one answer is that most test-takers don’t know the phrase “at once X and Y,” which is an expression that indicates that something has two attributes that might often be thought of as opposites. (For instance, we might say that the Eiffel Tower is “at once imposing and delicate.”)

If we know that that phrase exists, then we can probably tell that (E) is correct, because (E) starts with “and” and also includes the “because of” structure that’s in the first part of the prompt sentence.

By the way, even if we weren’t sure that “and” was the right way to start off this phrase, it might have helped us to realize that 2 answer choices start with “and,” while no other word appears at the beginning of the answer choices more than once. This doesn’t always indicate that the correct answer should start with “and,” but it strongly suggests that the correct answer
probably
starts with “and.”

This is yet another example of a Writing question that incorrectly compares two things of different types. If we read carefully, we see that the things being compared in the original sentence are “the
number
of alligators” and “the Gila monster.” In other words, the original sentence is comparing a number to an animal. But on the SAT, we have to compare things of similar kinds. So in this case, we either need to compare an animal to an animal, or a number to a number.

The only answer choice that fixes this problem is (E), which talks about “a comparison of the numbers of [both animals].” The fact that t
he word “numbers” is plural means that we’re talking about the number of alligators and the number of Gila monsters.

As is often the case, being aware of the College Board’s rules helps us cut right to the heart of the matter and identify the only answer choice that will be grammatically acceptable on the SAT.

This is probably the single Improving Sentences question that I get asked about the most.

Part of the difficulty for most students stems from the fact that the answer choices all involve such long phrases, and that so many of the phrases in the different choices are so similar to one another.

In these situations, it’s very important not to get overwhelmed by details. We should just pick a part of the answer choices to focus on and start there, and see what happens.

My inclination would be to start with the shortest answer choice—if that one is grammatically okay, then we know it’s the right answer. Unfortunately, in this case the shortest answer choice, (E), would result in an incomplete sentence, because it uses the word “being” instead of “are” or “were.” So it’s wrong, and we’re going to have to work a bit more to answer the question. Oh well.

We could also start with the original version of the underlined phrase, which we’ll find in choice (A). (A) really doesn’t seem too bad from a grammatical standpoint, but since it’s not the shortest answer choice we’ll need more than just acceptable grammar. One thing that puts me off about (A) is the phrase “that of the” at the end—that’s a lot of short words in a row, and they don’t seem to be necessary. At any rate, let’s hold on to (A) and keep moving.

We might as well look at (B) next. (B) seems grammatically weird because of the phrase “there were” after the comma.

(C) might seem tempting to a lot of students, but it makes one of the most
common (and subtle) errors that the College Board likes to test us on: it switches from plural to singular when it talks about “instruments” at the beginning of the sentence but then switches to the singular verb “was.”

(D) is actually going to be the clear winner here when we take everything into consideration. It’s grammatically acceptable and it also avoids the short words “that” and “of” that appeared in choice (A). In fact, if we look carefully, (D) has all the same major phrases from (A) but in a slightly different order, and it omits those short words, so it’s the best choice.

Since we can clearly articulate a problem with each of the other choices, and since (D) follows the patterns that correct answers tend to follow, we know it’s the right choice. As you can see, this type of analysis isn’t that hard to do if you just take it step by step, but it does definitely require you to read carefully and pay attention to the text—just like the rest of the SAT does!

Many students incorrectly choose (E) for this question, because it’s the shortest choice and they think it’s grammatically okay. But we can’t say “emphasize how” in this context; we need to go with “emphasize that.” (As is often the case, there are more choices that begin with the word “that” than the word “how,” indicating that “that” is probably the correct option.)

The other issue in this question is the incorrect use of “their,” which is plural, to refer to the singular noun “woman” in the original sentence. (B) fixes this issue without introducing any “-ing” words like (C) does, so (B) is the right answer.

This question is another good example of the way zeroing in on a key issue often helps us identify the right answer immediately, without getting bogged down in extraneous stuff.

In this case, the structure “X rather than Y” requires us to put X and Y in the same grammatical form (at least in terms of SAT rules). Since the first half of the sentence has “to appeal and persuade,” we need another option with “to” in it. Only (E) has that, with “to educate and inform.”

Another way to identify that (E) is correct is to note that it’s the shortest answer choice and that it has no grammatical mistakes.

This question provides us with a good opportunity to observe several of the College Board’s patterns and rules in action.

First, since the underlined portion is short, we can expect that the question is probably meant to test grammar alone, which turns out to be the case.

We might also be tempted to assume that the correct answer would avoid the word “in,” since the first 3 answer choices start with “either” and only 2 start with “in.” But notice that 4 of the choices actually include the word “in” at some point, which suggests that we might want to include it.

Of course, it becomes clear that we need to include “in” when we realize that the question is comparing two things, and that the first part of that comparison is the phrase “in poetry.”

That might get us down to (D) and (E). How do we know that (D) is correct? Well, as always, we arrive at that conclusion by thinking carefully about the elements of the question. In order for the phrase “either X or Y” to work on the SAT, X and Y must be two phrases of similar types. If we choose “either fiction or in drama,” then X would be “fiction” and Y would be “in drama,” which doesn’t work on the SAT since one phrase is just a noun and the other begins with the preposition “in.” So (D) is the way to go.

This question stumps a lot of test-takers because most of the answer choices sound pretty decent to most people. This is why it’s so important to know the rules of the test
. If we know that the shortest answer choice is always correct if it has no grammatical mistakes, we can say with confidence that (C) is the answer choice that the College Board will say is correct.

This question, like many Improving Sentences questions, is much more straightforward than it probably seems to most untrained test-takers.

(A) is the shortest answer choice and it has no grammatical mistakes, so (A) is automatically correct. That’s all there is to this one.

Let this question and the many questions like it remind you of how important it is to know the rules of the test and to read carefully!

We’ve now discussed all the rules, patterns, and strategies for Improving Sentences questions in the SAT Writing section, and you’ve seen them in action against a wide variety of actual SAT questions published by the College Board in the Blue Book.

After they’ve done a lot of Improving Sentences questions, many of my students often remark that these questions just seem to be repeating the same basic ideas over and over again. They’re exactly right to think that. And while it might seem frustrating to repeat the same basic steps for 2 dozen questions or so on each test,
we have to remember that this repetition is what makes the SAT so beatable once we understand how the game is played. (In fact, the whole point of this Black Book is to show you how to exploit the repetitive nature of the SAT.)

We want to get very familiar with the
rules and patterns of every type of SAT question so we can always identify correct answers and incorrect answers. This way, when a question goes well we’ll be able to realize that we’ve found the right answer, and when a question seems not to have a right answer that fits the patterns of all the other questions, we’ll know that we’ve made a mistake somewhere, and we can fix the mistake.

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

On the next page, you’ll find a quick summary of the main ideas for Improving Sentences questions. Then we’ll tackle the Improving Paragraphs questions after that. They’re basically a combination of the SAT grammar and style ideas we’ve covered already, with some ideas from the Critical Reading section thrown in.

This is a one-page summary of the major relevant concepts. 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:
There are
3 bizarre patterns
that help us identify the correct answers in situations where it’s not clear.

Here are the rules for these questions:

o
The SAT grammar concepts from the Identifying Sentence Errors questions still apply to these questions. The right answer must be grammatically okay.

o
But SAT style also counts on these questions. Sometimes you’ll have two or more choices that are grammatically okay, and then you’ll need the style patterns (see below).

o
Don't pick a choice that fixes one problem but creates another.

o
Choice (A) is always the same as the sentence.

Here are the 3 patterns:

o
Shorter is better
, all other things being equal.

o
Fewer words ending in “-ed” or “-ing” is better, all other things being equal.

o
Fewer words that are under 5 letters long
(“that,” “and,” “as,” “in,” “by,” how,” and so on) is better, all other things being equal.

Here's the general Improving Sentences process:

o
Read entire prompt sentence.

o
Read the answer choices and eliminate any with grammatical mistakes.

o
If you’re not instinctively sure which choice has the best SAT style, then determine which choice follows the most of the 3 patterns above.

o
Read the entire sentence with your preferred answer choice in place of the underlined portion to make sure it’s good.

o
Mark your answer or skip the question.

For examples of these principles in action, please see the Blue Book solutions in this Black Book.