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, 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 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 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.”
