by Erica L. Meltzer | May 20, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
This is another one of those lovely “true 100% of the time” rules — they pop up so infrequently on the SAT that you really do appreciate them when they appear. Even better, this is a rule that the College Board tests pretty often, so there’s a decent chance you’ll come across it in any given Error-ID section. And if you do happen to encounter it, it’s an easy point. You don’t even have to think about the other options. Here’s why: “Between” is a preposition, and prepositions are always followed by object (rather than subject) pronouns.
Subject Pronouns
I
You
She/He/It
We
You
They
Object Pronouns
Me
You
Her/Him/It
Us
You
Them
Since the “you” forms are identical in subject and object form, SAT does not test them. Most often, it tests the first person singular (I vs. Me) or third person singular (he vs. him).
Subject pronouns are used as subjects, while object pronouns can be used as objects (I know, big shock there).
To give an obvious example, you would say, “I went to the store,” not “me went to the store” because “I” is a subject pronoun; however, you would say “I see her,” not “I see she” because “her” is an object pronoun.
Likewise, you’d say “This book is for her,” not “This book is for she.” Thus, you would always say “between you and me” (preposition + object pronoun + object) pronoun, NOT “between you and I” (preposition + object pronoun + subject pronoun).
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 18, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
If you are not, under any circumstances, willing to jump around within sections, then please skip this article. If you are willing to do so, however, this is a strategy you might want to try. It’s based on the principle that since (1) you have a limited amount of time, and that (2) every question, easy or hard, is worth exactly the same number of points, your goal should be to obtain as many points as quickly as possible.
However: since reading questions are presented in no particular order of difficulty, you need to do a little bit of work upfront to identify questions likely to take you a while to answer before you get caught up in them and waste a couple of minutes better spent answering two or three other questions quickly.
While I do understand that different questions are hard for different people, the following types of questions generally tend to be more time-consuming than others because it is very difficult to answer them based on a general knowledge of the passage; you must almost always go back and read carefully.
-Which of the following? I, II, and III
These tend to take the most time, so they should be the last questions you do. Especially on the ACT, where you can go crazy trying to locate the necessary information.
-Paired passage relationship questions
Usually these require multiple steps of logic. The good news is that they come after individual-passage questions, so you don’t have to hunt for them.
-ACT questions that ask about dates or years.
Although these questions may seem straightforward, the exact information rarely appears directly in the passage, and it is often necessary to perform some basic calculations in order to determine the answer.
-All of the following EXCEPT
While you can often eliminate a couple of answers based on your memory of the passage, there’s often no way to be certain unless you go back and hunt for the others.
-Graphic/passage questions on the SAT
Particularly if you’re not ask comfortable with graph-based questions as you are with text-based questions, it’s a good idea to leave these questions until after you’ve answered all of the other questions in a set.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 17, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Beyond the fact that Fixing Sentences comprises about half of the SAT multiple-choice Writing questions (25/49), it is significant for another reason: it’s always Section 10, the last section of the test.
The good news is that at 10 minutes, it’s the shortest section. The bad news is that when you get to it, you’ll have already sat through 4.5 hours of testing.
Unfortunately, Writing has the steepest curve of the three sections. While missing five questions will cost you about 50 points on Critical Reading, it will cost you 100 on Writing.
You must therefore be absolutely systematic in attacking each question. And given that you won’t have a brain cell to spare when you deal with the last of Fixing Sentences, you need to know what you’re looking for.
The following rules provide general guidelines for selecting answer choices. They won’t get you the answer for every question, but for the vast majority, they will allow you to eliminate incorrect options faster and with less chance of second-guessing yourself.
1) Shorter is better
Since the SAT prizes conciseness, shorter answers are more likely to be correct. To save yourself time, look at answer choices from shortest to longest.
Particularly at the beginnings of sections, it is highly unlikely that one of the longer answers will be correct, and by checking the shorter ones first, you can save huge amounts of time.
Furthermore, whenever you are stuck between two answers, both of which are grammatically correct and express the same essential information, the shorter one will always be correct.
2) Gerunds (-ING), especially “Being” = BAD
Gerunds create sentence fragments and make things unnecessarily awkward. When given the the choice between a gerund a conjugated verb, assuming that both are grammatically correct, always go for the latter.
If you cross out all of the gerunds and don’t see anything that works, then you can reassess. Normally, however, if you start out by assuming that answers containing gerunds are incorrect, you’ll be right.
3) Passive Voice = BAD
Active: The politician gave the speech.
Passive: The speech was given by the politician.
Like gerunds, passive voice can make things unnecessarily wordy and long (and shorter is better, remember?) If you have to choose between an active and a passive version of the same sentence, go for the active one.
In addition, make sure you look out for the following:
-Comma Splices (always wrong)
-Non-Essential Clauses (answer is always right when it contains a correctly used NEC)
-Semicolon + however, therefore, moreover, or consequently (probably right)
-Semicolon + FANBOYS conjunction (always wrong)
-Answers that include the following words: plus, whereby, this, it, and that (usually wrong)
-Parallelism problem on the last question of the section.
Let’s see how that applies to a real question:
A poetic form congenial to Robert Browning was the dramatic monologue, it let him explore a character’s
mind without the simplifications demanded by stage productions.
(A) monologue, it lets him explore
(B) monologue, which let him explore
(C) monologue that lets him explore
(D) monologue; letting him explore
(E) monologue by letting him do exploration of
Strategy: if you recognize that (A), the original version of the sentence, is a comma splice, so it can be eliminated immediately.
(D) and (E) contain gerunds, so they can also be eliminated, leaving us with (B) and (C).
Choice (C) is shorter, but the verb (“lets”) is in the present, whereas the rest of the sentence is in the past, so (B) is the answer.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 15, 2011 | ACT Essay, Blog
If you’re planning to take the ACT and aren’t a big fan of writing timed essays, you’re probably tempted to sign up for the ACT without writing.
Please don’t.
An increasing number of colleges, including many large state universities (e.g. the University of Illinois), do require the ACT with Writing, and you risk seriously limiting your options if you take it without.
Furthermore, most colleges will not let you mix and match scores: if you take the ACT twice, once with writing and once without, you cannot simply tack your writing score onto the non-Writing test; that entire test will be considered, not just the essay portion.
The good news is that the essay score does not get factored into your overall score; a 32 composite with an 8 essay stays a 32 composite.??But without that essay score, your ACT won’t count at all.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 14, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Who vs. whom (who is switched only with which)
Which vs. that
“Neither…nor” with subject-verb agreement using plural nouns (e.g. “Neither book nor the pencil is on the table” is tested; “Neither book nor the pencils are on the table” is not)
Among vs. between
Much vs. many
Fewer vs. less
Further vs. farther
Its vs. it’s
Their vs. they’re vs. there
Who’s vs. whose
May vs. might
A lot vs. alot
Pronoun case with comparisons (“She is a better soccer player than I” vs. “She is a better soccer player than me”)
Subject verb agreement with “none” (“None of us know vs. None of us knows”)
Colons (very, very occasionally, a correct answer will contain a colon, but they’re not explicitly tested)
Dashes
Apostrophes (plural vs. possessive)
And punctuation errors are virtually never tested on the Error-Identification section! Very rarely a comma splice will occur, but questions like that are rare exceptions.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 14, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of my favorite things to say about the SAT is that it’s a moderately difficult test dressed up to appear much harder than it actually is. Many of the skills that the SAT covers are not outrageously advanced — it’s just that it tests those skills indirectly. The hard part is figuring out which piece of knowledge to apply, not the actual piece of knowledge itself
As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of SAT questions have “back doors” that can lead you to the answer almost instantaneously. The people who do the best on the SAT are generally the ones who can spot those back doors immediately and who, as a result don’t get lost in the details or waste a lot of mental energy playing trial and error.
Rhetorical strategy questions almost always contain these back doors, and learning to recognize them can often help you to find the answer in a matter of seconds.
Let’s assume you encounter the following (real) question on a Passage 1/Passage 2 set:
Both passages make use of which of the following:
(A) Political allusion
(B) Direct quotation
(C) Rhetorical questioning
(D) Personal anecdote
(E) Extended metaphor
When most people see a question like this, they scramble frantically to remember just what their English teacher said about metaphors and allusions… And right about the time they realize that they’re not 100% sure what an anecdote is, panic inevitably starts to set in.
They race back to the passages and start to skim through them, not really sure what they’re looking for but thinking that just maybe the answer will leap out at them. And when it doesn’t, they decide to just pick C because hey, that sounds like it could be correct, and it’s more likely to be C than any other answer, right? (It’s not, and it isn’t.)
Sound familiar?
If not, you’re lucky, but for the rest of you, keep reading.
The most important things to know about tackling these kinds of questions is that some answers are much easier to check out than others, and that you should always start by working from the most concrete to the most abstract answer. More often than not, the answer will be one of the most straightforward options.
In this case, “direct quotation,” choice (B), is the easiest answer to look for. It’ll be an option on many rhetorical strategy questions, and you should always start with it. In this case, you can just skim through the passages to check for phrases in quotation marks. If you see them, there’s your answer. (It is actually the answer to this question). Over in about five seconds, and you didn’t need to really reread anything.
If that weren’t the answer, however, you’d move to the next easiest answers to check: (C) and (D).
(C) Just look for question marks. If you don’t find them in both passages, get rid of the answer. It’s virtually impossible that there will be questions in both passages, one of which is rhetorical and the other not. The SAT doesn’t really employ that level of trickiness.
(D) Even if you don’t know what an “anecdote” is (it’s a story), the word “personal” tells you to look for the words “I” or “my.” If it’s there, it’s the answer; if not, cross it off.
So that would leave you with (A) and (E). Which is easier to check? Well, even if you don’t know what an “allusion” is (it’s a reference), you can certainly check for stuff about politics. If you find it, pick (A). If not, pick (E).
As a side note, however, it is exceedingly unlikely that you’d get two passages with extended metaphors. P1/P2 passages tend to contain significant stylistic differences, and if one is based around a metaphor, the other is likely to be very straightforward.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 11, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
I’m the first person to admit that studying for the SAT is exhausting. After even an hour-and-a-half of tutoring, I often find that I need to take a long walk to clear my head. Sometimes spending 90 minutes explaining why choice (A) wrong because it contains a single incorrect word while choice (C) is actually right because it restates the main idea of lines 25-42, only in more abstract terms, is just so intense that it really does take me a while to recover. Given that, I find it amazing anyone could study for a standardized test for a long stretches of time.
My advice is, quite simply, don’t. Studying for the SAT or the ACT can be exhausting. If you treat them like a sort of mind game or logic puzzle, these tests can also be fun, but let’s face it, a lot of the time, they’re not. Especially if you’re sitting down to the Official Guide after doing two hours of AP Calc homework and trying to write that essay on Ulysses.
The most important thing for SAT/ACT prep is that you study consistently, not that you study a lot at a time. If you try to swallow the whole thing at once, you’ll get burned out and frustrated, and the test will start to seem totally overwhelming. Instead, spend maybe 15 minutes a day prepping, and only focus on the things you don’t know how to do. You won’t forget the other stuff.
Studies have shown that the people at the top of their fields spend most of the practice time strengthening their weakest skills rather than simply rushing through everything they’re already good at. The same applies to the SAT and the ACT. Quantity of studying does not equal quality of studying. You will need to spend some time figuring out which kinds of questions give you the most trouble, but once you’ve determined that, make a list of the rules/concepts you don’t know, and work through them one at a time. Fifteen minutes a day every day is better than doing nothing for two months and then trying to cram in two or three hours a day. You’ll be be calmer, retain more information, and your score will most likely improve more than it would have otherwise.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 11, 2011 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Diction (aka usage or “wrong-word”) issues are frequently cited as one of the top errors that the SAT Writing section tests, but the reality is that they only show up occasionally. In all the College Board tests I’ve ever looked at — and that’s quite a few — I’ve seen no more than a handful. It doesn’t matter if the other prep books include it all over the place; the College Board doesn’t.
So yes, while you should learn the difference between “affect” and “effect” so that you can use the words properly in your own writing, in terms of the SAT, I would not suggest that you spend your time memorizing long lists of commonly confused words. When usage errors do appear, they tend to be highly unexpected and often involve switching two words (e.g. “collaborate” and “corroborate”) that you’d never necessarily expect to be switched from looking at a “commonly switched words” list. You’ll either spot the error or you won’t. Besides reading a lot and developing a good ear for usage, there’s no real way to prepare.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my philosophy is that you should spend your time worrying about the things that are pretty much guaranteed to be on the test (subject- verb agreement, pronoun agreement, tense consistency, dangling modifiers, semicolons, etc.) and that are well within your control. As for the rest, it’s not worth your time to worry about. You can hit 750+ just focusing on the other, and once you’re in that range, it’s no longer about your scores.
P.S. In case you were wondering about the whole affect vs. effect thing, the former is a typically used as a verb and the latter as a noun: “I was strongly affected by the movie,” BUT “the movie had a strong effect on me.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 11, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Time Management
If you find yourself in the habit of slowing down on the rhetoric questions and then having to race at the end of the English sections, please consider
trying this out. (If you’re fine on time and have no problem with rhetoric questions, you can ignore this post.)
On ACT English, you have 45 minutes for 75 questions, divided into five passages with 15 questions each. That breaks down into 9 minutes per passage, or a little over 30 seconds per question.
As you may already know, however, some ACT English questions take far more time to finish than others. Grammar questions are often fairly straightforward and can often be done in a matter of seconds. However, rhetoric questions, especially ones that require you to reread substantial portions of the passage, can take much longer.
Now, rhetoric questions are usually located at the end of each passage — but not always. Sometimes they come right at the beginning. Sometimes they’re mixed in with grammar questions. When that’s the case, forget them for a little bit. Mark the ones you skip so you won’t forget to come back to them later, then do all the grammar questions.
If you get done with the grammar questions before the 9 minutes are up, go back to the rhetoric questions you skipped; if not, move on and do the same thing for the next passage (but don’t forget to guess on the ones you skipped; it can’t hurt you).
Your goal should be to get as many questions right as fast as you can. No question counts more than any other question, so it’s in your interest to first do all the questions you’re sure of, then worry about the ones you’re shaky on.
So the bottom line is this: don’t waste time working on a question you might not get right at the expense of working on a question you’ll almost certainly get right.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 10, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
If you’ve read some of my other posts, you probably know that I’m not a big fan of the big-name test-prep guides (e.g. Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barron’s, etc.). But while I admit that they might have some merit for Math, the one section that you should absolutely and incontrovertibly not compromise on, at least in terms of taking practice tests, is Reading.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) The answer choices are problematic
The answers are either 1) improperly reasoned, 2) go outside the bounds of the passage — that is, they actually require you to have some outside knowledge of a subject in order to infer the answer to a question — or 3) force you to make irrelevant distinctions. What ultimately happens is that people walk away with the impression that the answers to questions are arbitrary, that they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the readings themselves. It also makes it impossible to apply any sort of rigorous reasoning process to the test, when in fact it is precisely the refinement of that reasoning process that often leads to higher scores. SAT and ACT questions may feel tricky at times, but the right answer is still the only right answer, not something completely arbitrary cooked up by the test-makers.
2) The passages are wrong
This usually comes down to one issue: copyright. Most of the passages that show up on the SAT and ACT are taken from books published in the last couple of decades — that is, books still under copyright. In order to accurately mimic the test, therefore, it is necessary to use texts from recent works. The College Board and the ACT are able to gain permission for the works from the publishers; for whatever reason (money?), the major test-prep companies usually are not. As a result, those companies are forced to use either texts no longer under copyright (from books more than 70 years old) or have passages written specifically for them. Both of these have major issues.
First, texts more than 70 years old, while difficult, are not difficult in the precise way that real SAT/ACT texts are difficult. Their language, style, and subject matter are often old-fashioned, and they give the impression that the reading portions of both tests loftier and more overtly literary than they are.
On the other hand, passages written specifically for test-prep guides tend to be overly straightforward and factual, whereas real test passages are usually somewhat more complex both in terms of topic and organization.
So please, do yourself a favor: if you haven’t been using the College Board book or the ACT Official Guide for Reading, go out and get it. And if you’ve finished all the tests in it and want to study some more, sign up for the online program. And if you’re done with that, well, go on the Scientific American or Smithsonian magazine website and, and start reading.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 9, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
The word “being” is hands-down the most dangerous word on both the Fixing Sentences portion of the SAT (not Error-Identification!) and on ACT English.
In fact, the appearance of the word “being” in an answer choice is virtually guaranteed to make that answer incorrect.
This is the case for a couple of reasons. First, “being” is a gerund (verb + -ING). Gerunds are not verbs, and they cannot be used to replace verbs.
Not a sentence: Rome being a beautiful and historical city.
Sentnece: Rome is a beautiful and historical city.
Any phrase that contains only a gerund is a fragment and is never correct in formal written English. Not on the SAT, not on the ACT, not in real life.
Even when “being” is grammatically acceptable, it still has a tendency to make things kind of clunky and awkward.
On the SAT, the phrase “being that” should be replaced by “because:”
Awkward: Being that Marco has studied Italian for five years, he can converse with his relatives in Rome.
Clear: Because Marco has studied Italian for five years, he can converse with his relatives in Rome.
And the phrase “because of being” should be replaced by the subject and the conjugated verb:
Awkward: Because of being fluent in Italian, Marco can converse with his relatives in Rome.
Clear: Because he is fluent in Italian, Marco can converse with his relatives in Rome.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 8, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Paired passage questions have a reputation for being some of the most headache-inducing questions on the SAT. While I agree that they’re not exactly fun, the relationships between the two passages do tend to fall into a small number of predictable categories used over and over again. If you approach the two passages with these “templates” in mind, you can probably save yourself some frustration.
1) Passage 1 and Passage 2 present opposing views of the same topic (P1 = Positive, P2 = Negative or vice-versa). This is the most common relationship.
2) Passage 1 and Passage 2 agree but have different focuses or stylistic differences (e.g. P1 is written in the third person and P2 is written in the first person)
3) Passage 1 and Passage 2 discuss completely different aspects of the same event (e.g. P1 focuses on how an event was perceived by the press, P2 focuses on how it affected women)
4) Passage 2 provides an example of a phenomenon discussed in Passage 1
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 7, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Rule: whenever you are given the choice between a gerund and a conjugated verb on either SAT Writing (Fixing Sentences) or ACT English, pick the conjugated verb. If you’re scanning through ACT English or Fixing Sentences answers, you should automatically cross out any options that contain gerunds. If nothing that remains works, then you can go back and reassess, but this strategy will usually get you to the right answer a whole lot faster.
Here’s why: Gerunds can be nasty little critters. They look like verbs. They sound like verbs. They *ought* to be verbs. But they’re not.
Although they are created from verbs, for all practical purposes they are in fact nouns.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, gerunds are built by adding -ING onto verbs
Be —– Being
Have —– Having
Run —– Running
You get the picture. Gerunds are frequently used with the possessive (e.g. “The teacher was annoyed by his incessant talking during class”), although they can also be used with object pronouns (The teacher was annoyed by him talking incessantly during class). The second one has a slightly different emphasis, but it is acceptable.
The possessive vs. object distinction (his vs. him) before a gerund is NOT tested on either the SAT or the ACT.
Since gerunds are not verbs, they cannot replace verbs. A sentence that contains only a gerund is actually missing a main verb. Any sentence on the SAT or the ACT that includes only a gerund is automatically incorrect.
Much of the time, this error will be pretty obvious:
Incorrect: The senator giving a press conference about her decision not to run for re-election.
And the easiest way to fix it is simply to stick in a conjugated verb
Correct: The senator gave a press conference about her decision not to run for re-election.
But sometimes they’ll try to confuse you with multiple clauses or false parallelisms:
Incorrect: The senator, who earlier in the week had publicized her intention to run for re-election, calling a press conference to announce her decision to pursue other political goals.
Correct: The senator, who earlier in the week had publicized her intention to run for re-election, called a press conference to announce her decision to pursue other political goals.
Or:
Incorrect: The senator publicizing her intention to run for re-election but later calling a press conference to announce her decision to pursue other political goals.
It may be parallel, but it’s not correct!
Correct: The senator publicized her intention to run for re-election but later called a press conference to announce her decision to pursue other political goals.
On the other hand, gerunds can be used as subjects because they are actually nouns. When they are used this way, they always take singular verbs.
Correct: Distributing copies of her new book was the mayor’s primary strategy for publicizing her campaign.
Incorrect: Distributing copies of her new book were the mayor’s primary strategy for publicizing her campaign.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 4, 2011 | Blog, General Tips, Time Management
Myth: the best way to study for a timed standardized test is to always time yourself rigidly and focus on getting your speed up.
Reality: sometimes it’s better to first focus on learning the test material along with strategies for handling it, then deal with time issue.
Let me put it this way: suppose you had a math final that would last 90 minutes. You knew that it would cover all the material you had learned during the semester, and that it would require you to apply your knowledge in new ways so that your teacher could see if you really understood what you’d learned.
What would you do?
Would you spend all of your time worrying about the fact that you only had 50 minutes to finish the test and study mainly by trying to answer practice problems faster, or would you go back to your notes and work on mastering understanding the fundamentals of what you’d covered so that you could in fact apply your knowledge to a kind of problem you’d never seen before?
I’m guessing you picked the latter (if you didn’t, well… you might want to rethink some of your study habits). So why would you treat the SAT any differently?
I know that everyone says studying for these tests is totally, completely, utterly different from studying for a test in school, but actually that’s not quite true.
As I’ve written about before, time issues are usually knowledge issues in disguise. If you work on solving the knowledge component, the time issue usually goes away on its own. Spending an hour deconstructing four or five questions to the point at which you understand the rules they’re testing cold is infinitely more productive than taking a full test and missing the same old things you usually miss. Then when you feel like you understand things, move up to a full section, and finally start to time yourself.
If you’re planning to take the SAT in three days, as some of you may be, then obviously this isn’t going to work. But if you have some time, even a month, then try it.
The other reason why working slowly at first is so important is that most SAT questions — and some ACT questions — have a sort of “back door” that allows you to solve them very quickly without wasting time pondering the answers. For example:
Word Pair questions on the SAT Writing section: if you know all the word pairs cold (see the grammar rules page for the complete list), you can spot many correct answers without even reading through all of the choices.
“The point of lines xxx…” on Critical Reading. Usually reading the sentence before the given lines will get you the answer. If you can match the idea of that sentence to an answer choice, you’re done.
On ACT English, you can automatically eliminate grammatically equivalent answer choices such as Comma + FANBOYS, Semicolon, and Period.
More than anything else, teaching yourself to recognize those back doors will help you get your time down. But, paradoxically, you might have to go very, very slowly at first in order to achieve that.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 3, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
If “it” is one of the most dangerous words on the Writing section of the SAT, then “do it” is one of the most dangerous phrases. While I’m hesitant to say that any particular word or phrase will be wrong 100% of the time — the College Board can always figure out a new way to test a particular rule — “do it” comes pretty close.
The reason this phrase is so often incorrect is based on the fact that pronouns such as “it” can only refer to nouns or gerunds ( the -ING form a verb), never to any other part of speech such as verbs or adjectives. For example:
Incorrect: People who become vegetarians often do it because they believe strongly in animal rights.
What does the word “it” refer to?
Becoming vegetarians.
But the gerund “becoming” doesn’t actually show up in the sentence, only the verb “become.” And a pronoun can only refer to a noun or a gerund, not a verb.
The pronoun “it” therefore doesn’t actually refer to anything (in grammatical terms, we can say that it lacks an antecedent), and the sentence cannot be correct. To fix it, we must instead say:
Correct: People who become vegetarians often do so because they believe strongly in animal rights.
On the flipside, anytime you see the phrase “do so” underlined, it is almost certainly correct, and there’s a pretty good chance that the answer to the question will be “No error.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 2, 2011 | Reading (SAT & ACT)
Warning: while this may look like an awfully long list of things to circle, chances are that only a handful of these words/phrases will show up on any given passage. This is also not intended to be a exercise in memorization; rather, it is to get you thinking about the kinds of ways in which authors indicate to their readers the most important aspects of what they’re trying to say.
Furthermore, the point of looking out for these things is not to turn your reading into a transition hunt at the expense of actually absorbing what you’re reading. Just circling transitions mechanically and not thinking about what role they play in the passage at large will not get you very far and may in fact make things harder for you. However, if you actively consider them in relation to the point of the passage once you’ve established it, they will help you establish a general “map” of the key places in the argument.
Major Transitions:
Supporting:
And
So
For
In fact
Indeed
Of course
Therefore/Thus
Consequently
As a result
In addition
Also
Furthermore
Moreover
Likewise
Similarly
Contradicting:
But
Yet
However
(Al)though/Even though
Despite
While
Whereas
Nevertheless
Rather
Comparison/Contrast:
In comparison
In contrast
Just as…so
Explanations:
Because
Since
Explains
The answer is
Giving you the point:
The point is
The goal/aim is
To sum up
In other words
After all
In the end
The (main) idea
Important Information:
Important
Key
Crucial
Essential
Fundamental
It is true/not true
It is clear/unclear
Strong Language:
Absolutely
Unequivocally
Exceptionally
Extraordinarily
Unquestionably
Definitely
Always
Never
Nothing
Inevitably
Fundamentally
“Unusual” Punctuation:
Question Marks – Indicate rhetorical questions. Questions are prime targets for inference questions because information is often implied but not stated.
Colons – Explanations Dashes – Explanations or supplementary (qualifying) information
Semicolons – Imply a relationship between two thoughts that is not necessarily spelled out — likely spot for inference questions to deal with
Words in quotes – Used figuratively. The answer to at least one question will depend on your understanding of how a word in quotes is being used, even if the question doesn’t ask about it directly. Often indicates skepticism.
Italicized words – Used to emphasize, underscore, call attention to, highlight
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 27, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT), SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the hardest things for many test-takers to adjust to on the SAT and ACT is the idea that English questions have answers that are both objectively correct and objectively incorrect. The truth, however, is that if you really want to improve your score, you need to approach each question with the attitude that there is only one answer. It might not be phrased in the way you would say it, or even be the answer that you would expect to see, but that doesn’t make it any less right.
Your English teacher might give you points for the creativity of your interpretations; ETS and the ACT will not. These tests are in no way, shape or form asking for your own personal interpretation or for speculation about what might be going on in a given passage; they are asking for what an author indicates is definitely going on in the passage. That means you need to base your answer exclusively on the exact wording that appears in the text and nothing else. If you have to twist the passage in any way to make the answer work, the answer is wrong.
In other words, match the question to the passage, not the passage to the question.
Let’s look at an example:
Newspaper editor and political commentator Henry Louis Mencken was a force of nature, brushing aside all objects animal and mineral in his headlong rush to the publicity that surely awaited him. He seized each day, shook it to within an inch of its life, and then gaily went on to the next. No matter where his writing appeared, it was quoted widely, his pungently outspoken opinions debated hotly. Nobody else could make so many people so angry, or make so many others laugh so hard.
9. In lines 4-5, the words “seized” and “shook” help establish which aspect of Mencken’s personality?
(A) His code of honor
(B) His sense of humor
(C) His vindictiveness
(D) His intensity
(E) His petulance
What words does the author use to describe Louis Mencken?
He was “a force of nature.” He “brushed aside objects…in his headlong rush.” He “seized each day and shook it…then went gaily onto the next.”
So Louis Mencken was like a whirlwind. He threw himself into things and did them as fully as possible. All this clearly points to (D) because someone who behaves like this is pretty intense.
If you were to read the question first and then just glance through the passage, however, you might just pick up on words/phrases like “brushed aside,” “seized,” and “hotly debated,” all of which are pretty negative, you might go for (C) or (E) instead. Now, Louis Mencken could have also been vindictive in his life. He could have also been petulant (irritable or ill-tempered).
But if you read carefully, this particular author is not actually saying either of those things about Mencken in this particular passage.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 24, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Sometime around second or third grade, most people learn that it’s not ok to start to start a sentence with the word “because.” While I have no desire to cast aspersion on your third-grade teacher, unfortunately that rule is only half true. The main reason is gets taught that way is that seven and eight year-olds have a tendency to write sentences like this:
Because I went to Disneyland last summer!
Or:
Because I played hockey with my brother last weekend.
As I hope you can recognize, neither of these is a full sentence; it is unacceptable to begin the sentences such as these with “because.”
Unfortunately, though, a lot of the time no one bothers to teach the other half of the rule three or four years down the line. The truth is that under certain circumstances it’s perfectly fine to start a sentence with “because.”
Here’s when: a clause beginning with “because” (e.g. “because I stayed out late last night) must be followed by a complete sentence.
Correct: Because I stayed out late last night, I fell asleep in math class this morning.
Since the second clause, “I fell asleep in math class this morning,” works as a stand-alone statement, it’s perfectly acceptable to start the entire sentence with “because.”
