SAT Writing Multiple Choice is No Big Deal

The SAT Writing multiple choice questions are often a weak point for many test-takers. The essay is hard enough how can anyone write a decent essay in 25 minutes? - but the multiple choice portion can seem downright impossible. For example, how can the College Board expect you to choose which of five versions of a sentence is “best?” And what determines the best way to organize a paragraph?

These are fair questions, and most students never get decent answers to them. Instead they get explanations about things like “clarity” and “awkwardness” that are so vague as to be completely unhelpful. Hard as it may be to believe, though, there are perfectly concrete, repeatable ways to answer these questions - if you know the right way to look at them.

Perhaps the first, most daunting problem students face is the prospect of learning so much grammar for these questions. But SAT writing grammar is actually very limited. If you study with real SAT questions (which of course you should) you will see that most of the Identifying Sentence Errors questions address the same four or five concepts over and over and over again. Logically, instead of trying to digest the whole of English grammar, you should instead focus on those particular concepts that actually appear on the test. That will simplify things considerably.

Once you’ve checked out the actual grammar tested in real SAT questions written by the College Board, you should take note of the difference between the Identifying Sentence Errors questions and the Improving Sentences question. For Identifying Sentence Errors questions, you are looking for the answer choice which corresponds to a grammatical error in the sentence. It doesn’t matter if you just don’t like the way it’s written, you have to find an actual error. However, for the Improving Sentences questions, you are expected to find the version of the sentence which is written best. Often, several of the choices will be grammatically correct - but you must find the one that, according to the College Board’s perspective, is better than the others.

Don’t mix these up, or you’ll lose a lot of unnecessary points.

So what about those Improving Sentences questions. How are you supposed to know which of five choices is best? A lot of times it’s pretty obvious, but there are some where it seems like a real judgment call. Well, don’t worry. There are very important underlying standards going on in all Improving Sentences questions, and they can be particularly helpful when it seems like a toss-up between two or three choices.

1. The first standard is length. The answer choice which is shortest is frequently the best. This means length as measured a by a ruler, not the number of letters or words.
   
2. The second standard is words ending in -ed or -ing. The fewer words in an answer choice that end in -ed or -ing, the better.
   
3. The third and final standard is the number of short words (words with fewer than four letters). Wrong answer choices often contain several extra, unnecessary short words.

So those are the three Improving Sentences standards. If you’re ever stuck, just apply the standards, and the answer choice which has the most standards pointing to it is almost always correct. How is that possible, you ask? Well, the College Board’s favorite way to make incorrect answer choices is to add unnecessary words and phrases. So that accounts for the first standard. They like to verb phrases which include words like “doing,” “being,” “having,” “asked,” “talked,” etc. That accounts for the second standard. And, the way they stick those verb phrases in there requires them to use a lot of small words, like “that,” “were,” “and,” “as,” etc. That accounts for the third standard. But, as you can see instead, of learning about verb phrases, conjunctions, and all of that, it’s easier to follow these three standards, which work just as well if not better.

An often-overlooked portion of the Writing multiple choice portion of the SAT is the Improving Paragraphs section. Luckily, the Improving Paragraphs questions do not incorporate a lot of new material. They are basically a combination of SAT Critical Reading and Improving Sentences, so if you recognize those same patterns, you should do fine. There is one additional standard thrown in, however: on the SAT, a paragraph should contain as few ideas as possible. This means when you get the inevitable question about which sentence is the best one to add to a given paragraph, you want to find the one that does not add any new ideas in other words, that sentence which restates some of the information from the paragraph without adding anything else.

The Writing multiple choice section of the SAT appears confusing, difficult and arbitrary to most people. So does the rest of the test, really. But you must remember: the fact that the SAT is standardized is the key to the whole test! The SAT does not test hundreds of concepts; it tests maybe two dozen. Every trick and trap is part of a pattern, and if you can see the patterns, you’ll never fall for anything.

So now that you know what to do, go do it! Studying or memorizing shortcuts won’t get you anywhere; you have to see them at work in real SAT questions. So pick up your copy of the Official SAT Study Guide from the College Board (you do have that, right?) and get to work. Pick a section, do it in a quiet, timed environment, and then go over your incorrect answers. Figure out what was wrong about your answer choice, and why you picked it. Find the patterns that you missed the first time around, and think about why you missed them. Those are the simple steps that you need to take to master the SAT Writing questions, or any other question type on this test.

Tags: SAT writing multiple choice test prep college board grammar identifying sentence errors improving critical reading comprehension real questions | SAT writing multiple choice test prep college board grammar identifying sentence errors improving critical reading comprehension real questions

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