Dear College Board:
I understand that you are very busy helping students prepare for college and career readiness success in the 21st century; however, as I was perusing (excuse me, looking at) the section of your website devoted to describing the essay contest run jointly by your organization and The Atlantic magazine, I couldn’t help but notice a sentence that read as follows:
“To be successful at analytical writing, students must support your arguments with evidence found in the text and clearly convey information to the reader.”
As the writers of your website copy presumably know, the correct use of parallel structure and pronoun agreement is an important component of analytical writing — the exact type of writing that employees use authentically in their actual careers.
Moreover, given that your organization is responsible for testing over 1.5 million students on these exact concepts annually, I assume that the appearance of this type of faulty construction is simply the result of an oversight rather than any sort of indication that College Board writers lack the skills and knowledge necessary for success in the 21st century — that is, the skills and knowledge that matter most.
As you update your website to reflect the upcoming changes to the SAT, however, do try to remember that carefully editing your work is also an important skill for college and career readiness. After all, you wouldn’t want to set a poor example.
Best,
Erica
Oh, the irony.
Reads* as follows.
The first verb in the sentence, “couldn’t,” is in the past tense (simple past of “to be able to). As a result, the use of the simple past “read” is acceptable for the second verb; that construction simply keeps the tenses parallel. Since the sentence still reads as described in the post, the present could be used as well. Either tense is acceptable, and I happened to choose the past.
Keep it coming!