by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 19, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I’m normally very cautious about not correcting people’s grammar in daily speech, for fear of coming off as an inveterate snob. As a matter of fact, it makes me very self-conscious when people not preparing for the SAT or the ACT make jibes about how they’d better watch their grammar around me. Unless explicitly asked to comment, I keep my mouth shut. That said, the one thing that truly makes me grimace when I hear it in public conversation is a statement along the lines of the following:
“Well, if we only would have known the store was going to close at 6, we would have come sooner.”
I confess, I practically have to physically restrain myself from commenting; it’s like nails screeching on a blackboard. I know that the construction is (unfortunately) common, but it’s still flat-out wrong.
Here’s the short version of the rule: a clause beginning with if should contain have, not would have. However, a different clause in the same sentence may contain would have.
The reason is that both would and if both signal the conditional — that is, they refer to events that could have happened but that did not actually happen. To include both of these terms in the same clause is therefore redundant.
Incorrect: If we would have known the store was going to closer, we would have come sooner.
The sentence can also be correctly written this way:
Correct: If we had known the store was going to closer, we would have come sooner.
Correct: Had we known the store was going to closer, we would have come sooner.
So If I would have, If you would have, If they would have…. All wrong. The correct phrases are, If I had, If you had, If she had, etc.
So the next time you start to say, “If I would have only known…” you might want to think twice.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 18, 2011 | Blog, SAT vs. ACT
The short answer: No.
The long answer: Every now and again, I’ll stumble across some tutoring website announcement declaring that because the ACT is a “content-based” exam, designed to directly measure the kinds of skills that people learn in school, it is much less sensitive to tutoring than the SAT, which is primarily an exam about strategy and “how well someone can take the SAT.” As someone who has spent a good deal of time both writing and helping people prepare for both exams, I’d like to spend a little bit of time debunking that myth. First of all, in response to the idea that the ACT directly tests what students are learning in school, I’d like to say that I’m not really aware of any high school that teaches punctuation with anywhere near the level of thoroughness it’s tested on the ACT.
I’ve worked with numerous students from a particular “top-tier” NYC private school known, as James Atlas puts it, for its “intensely competitive students” (whom it requires to take several years of grammar), and not one of them has come close to knowing everything tested on the English portion of the ACT. In fact, some of them have been among the weakest students I’ve ever worked with.
I’ve also worked with kids from tip-top suburban districts who had idea how to use a colon or identify a non-essential clause. It seems to me that the ACT is testing the content that high schools should be teaching rather than the content they actually are teaching. The fact that the average national ACT score is 21.1 out of 36 seems to testify to that fact.
But does tutoring raise scores? Absolutely. Every one of my students who has put in a reasonable, consistent amount of study time has improved markedly — in some cases by 10 points. Most people scoring in the mid-high 20s can gain a good five points on English from capable tutoring. Some of the questions are very straightforward, but some of it them are extremely subtle (and tricky) and completely impervious to being answered by ear. As is the case for the SAT, you’re almost certain to get certain questions wrong unless you really understand the rules they’re testing. You learn the rules well enough, you get the questions right — it’s usually that simple.
As for the Reading… I’m not going to lie: tutoring ACT Reading can be more challenging than tutoring SAT Reading. The questions are often less predictable, less based on a holistic understanding of the passages, and most people have problems managing their time rather than actually knowing how to work through the questions.
But as I’ve written about before, ACT time management problems are usually something else in disguise. Many of the skills involved in locating information quickly actually involve logic skills similar to those tested on the SAT — how to make reasonable conjectures based on the organization of a passage or paragraph; how to identify important places in a passage based on the presence of particular transitions and punctuation marks; and how to determine the main idea or function of a passage or paragraph from reading key places (e.g. introduction, topic sentences) in the text. Work on the fundamentals enough and you usually see some improvement.
My biggest obstacle is convincing students that the ACT actually tests logic skills, even in a roundabout way, when they’ve fled the SAT precisely to avoid that kind of thinking. So no, the ACT is in no way less coachable than the SAT, at least on the verbal side of things. It has its own quirks and strategies, but the skills and concepts it tests can be taught just as thoroughly as they can for the SAT. As always, there are no guarantees, but in the hands of a competent tutor, most students should be able to raise their scores by at least a few points.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 2, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
On Fixing Sentences, a lot gets made out of the intrinsic wrongness of the word being. Yes, it’s awful, yes it’s dangerous, yes it’s wrong 98% of the time. But it’s not the only dangerous word on Fixing Sentences. In fact, I would argue that along with it, which is also wrong a very high percentage of the time, this is probably the next most dangerous word on the Writing section, particularly Fixing sentences. And it really shows up a lot.
If you’re looking for a very general rule, here goes: When this is immediately followed by a noun (e.g. this book, this fact, this idea), it’s right; when there’s no noun, it’s wrong. Usually there won’t be a noun.
Now for the explanation. Like it, this is a singular pronoun, which means that it must refer to a specific singular noun (or pronoun or gerund) that appears in the sentence. If the specific noun to which this refers (the antecedent) does not appear, the sentence is incorrect. For example:
Incorrect: Members of the local government have requested that more traffic lights be installed throughout the city because they believe that this will help to prevent accidents.
What does this refer to? it could refer to the traffic lights, but that’s plural. It could also refer to the installation of the traffic lights, but installation is a noun, and only installed, a verb, appears in the sentence. So there are a couple of ways to fix the sentence. You could provide a noun that clearly specifies what is being referred to:
Correct: Members of the local government have requested the installation of more traffic lights throughout the city because they believe that the lights will help to prevent accidents.
OR you can simply add a noun after this and specify what it refers to.
Correct: Members of the local government has requested the installation of more traffic lights throughout the city because they believe that this addition will help to prevent accidents.
Now, onto that:
Unlike this, that is usually correct when it shows up in a sentence. When it’s underlined in Error-IDs, it’s usually used this way:
Correct: The local believes that installing more traffic lights throughout the city will help to prevent accidents.
OR
Correct: The additional traffic lights that have recently been installed throughout the city are expected to help prevent accidents.
In the latter case, you might wondering why that rather than which should be used. The short answer is that which is always preceded by a comma and used to set off a non-essential clause (e.g. The additional traffic lights, which have recently been installed throughout the city, are expected to help prevent accidents.) That, on the other hand, is never preceded by a comma.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 30, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I’m convinced that one of the top reasons people lose points unnecessarily on Fixing Sentences is that they neglect to actually plug their chosen answer back into the sentence and consider it in context.
While in some cases an answer may be clearly better worded or more grammatically correct than all the others, in many other cases multiple answers may appear perfectly correct on their own. In such cases — especially ones in which you are dealing with a large amount of underlined information — you should take the extra time and double-check that your answer actually works in terms of syntax, clarity, and punctuation.
It is crucial that you pay attention to the punctuation aspect, particularly to the existing (non-underlined) commas within a sentence. This is because the comma splice (two full sentences joined only by a comma) is among the two or three most common types of wrong answer choices, and it shows up constantly. Constantly. If you’re facing a full sentence on one side a comma, you can’t have a full sentence on the other side. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds or how much sense it makes in context — it’s always going to be wrong.
For example:
During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, whereby they forbade artisans to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
(A) whereby they forbade artisans to leave
(B) as a result artisans were forbidden
(C) artisans were thus forbidden
(D) it being forbidden for artisans to leave
(E) and so artisans were forbidden
(A) and (D) are pretty clearly wrong, but (B), (C), and (E) all seem relatively plausible, right? Here’s the problem, though: the non-underlined portion of the sentence contains full sentence + comma, meaning that another full sentence cannot follow the comma without creating a comma splice.
If we plug these options into the sentence in turn, we get: (B) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, as a result artisans were forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
That’s two sentences separated by a comma, so that’s out.
(C) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, artisans were thus forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
That’s also two sentences separated by a comma, so it’s out too. It is very important to note that the second clause really is a full, grammatical stand-alone statement, even though it may not make logical sense outside of any context.
(E) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, and so artisans were forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
This answer correctly uses a FANBOYS conjunction to join the two sentences, thus eliminating the comma-splice problem.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 27, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
As I’ve written about before, one very helpful time and energy saving strategy on Fixing Sentences is to always start by looking at the shortest answer. Since one of the things that the SAT Writing section tests is your ability to eliminate wordy and awkward constructions, it follows logically that shorter answers are typically more likely than longer ones to be correct. Identifying the shortest answer, however, is not always as straightforward as it might seem.
Here why: One of the subtler tricks that the College Board likes to play involves altering the spacing of answer choices on the first line so that the various options appear closer to one another in length than they actually are. As a result, the shortest answer often appears to be virtually the same length as a substantially longer answer.
For example:
Traveling through Yosemite, the scenery of waterfalls
and granite peaks, which we photographed, was
beautiful.
(A) the scenery of waterfalls and granite peaks, which
we photographed, was beautiful
(B) the waterfalls and granite peaks were the beautiful
scenery we photographed
(C) we photographed the beautiful scenery of
waterfalls and granite peaks
(D) we photographed the scenery of waterfalls and
granite peaks, being beautiful
(E) what we photographed was the beautiful scenery
of waterfalls and granite peaks
All the answers look about the same, right? But actually they’re not. Look again at choice (C). Another word or two could easily fit on the top line, but it’s been truncated quite substantially so that the length of the second line will appear equal to the second line of the other answers. Even though (C), the correct answer, is only a word or two shorter than some of the other answer, it takes up a lot less space — and ETS doesn’t want that difference to be too obvious.
So when you’re looking for the shortest option, don’t just compare the ends of the answers — look at the first line, and you may be surprised at just how much of a variation there actually.
