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 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 | 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.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things I’ve noticed is that people hate to skip questions on the SAT. Even though they know that getting a question wrong will set them back an additional quarter of a point, they’d rather guess and risk lowering their score further than play it safe and move on. Skipping a question on the SAT is like admitting defeat: it means that you’re effectively giving up on the possibility of getting a perfect score, even if you’ve been consistently scoring in the mid 600s.
But guess what: while it does pretty much work that way for Math and Writing, on which even four missed questions can pretty much kill your chances of scoring in the 700s, Critical Reading has a much more generous curve. It is not necessary to answer every single question in order to obtain a high score. In fact, on some tests it’s actually possible to miss up to three questions and still get an 800. In contrast, four missed Writing questions along with an 8 essay will give you a score of about 670.
If you are actually trying to get an 800, I wouldn’t suggest that you skip Critical Reading questions (and if you are a serious contender for an 800, you really shouldn’t need to skip questions). But even if you’re just trying to break 700, you need to be open to the possibility of skipping a question or two if you really just have no idea about the answer.
To give you some cold, hard facts: In order to obtain a 700, it is usually necessary to obtain a raw score of about 57/67. Assuming that you skip 10 (!) questions and get all of the rest correct, that’s a 700 right there. Although I understand that skipping so many questions sounds far too risky to entertain, consider that choosing to skip 5 questions and then going for — and missing — another 5 that you’re not sure about will actually give you a score of 690. That’s a very important 10 points right there.
If you’re just trying to break 600, you have even more latitude. To hit 600, you only need a raw score of 45, or 2/3 of the questions right. Theoretically, if you skipped 22 questions and only answered the ones you were absolutely certain about, you could still pull a 600 (although I wouldn’t really advocate that you skip 22 questions).
A more likely scenario is that you skip 10 questions (which gets you to a raw score of 57), then miss another 8 for a raw score of 47 (8 x .25 = 2, and 49-2 = 47), for a scaled score of 610. If, on the other hand, you had tried to answer all 10 of the questions that you had skipped and gotten all of them wrong (statistically unlikely but possible if you really have no idea about them), that would give you a raw score of 42 and scaled 580.
So the bottom line is that sometimes you have be willing to give up the possibility of perfection in order to achieve something that’s merely very good. If you know that you always miss the last couple of vocab questions, plan to skip them; or, if you know that inference questions always trip you up, forget about them. It might just be enough to push your score to the next level.
