Chapter 1 : Introduction to SAT Grammar
Topics covered in this snack-sized chapter:
The SAT is a reasoning test.
It is composed of three types of sections:
There are two graded grammar sections on the SAT.
These sections test you on your knowledge of English grammar rules
There are three types of questions in SAT:
Revising sentences questions look like this:
Kelly liked the movie Charade not only because the dialogue was clever, and she liked Audrey Hepburn’s amazing outfits
.
- Part of the sentence is underlined.
- You will have the choice of whether to keep the sentence as it is, or whether to replace the underlined portion with one of 4 given options
- When you do these questions, read the sentence to yourself with each of the options plugged in, to see what sounds the best.
Finding sentence errors questions look like this:
Walking
through the Vatican, the tourist’s
A B
senses
were
overwhelmed by the
C
grandeur of
the structure. No Error
D
- For this type of question, you just have to pick which underlined part, if any, is grammatically incorrect.
- If there is no error, pick answer choice E, ‘No Error.’
- It can be hard to pick No Error, but it is equally frequently the correct answer.
- Make sure you notice whether punctuation marks such as commas are underlined.
Revising paragraph questions have a long paragraph and then ask you several questions about structure:
- What is the best way to order sentences?
- What is the best way to order paragraphs?
- Where do you need transitions, and what makes a good transition?
- This app just covers the grammar aspect of the SAT Writing sections, but you should try finding a couple of these types of questions online, just to familiarize yourself with them.
Like most of the SAT, the writing section goes in the order of difficulty. However, it’s grouped by question type, and the order of difficulty starts over for every new question type.
Pay close attention to whether you are at the beginning of a set of questions, or at the end.
- Questions at the beginning will be straightforward: If they sound incorrect they are incorrect
- Questions at the end will be hard: They may sound incorrect when they are really correct, or the other way around.
If you aren’t sure of the answer, skip the question, rather than lose a quarter points for an incorrect answer.
There are a few grammar concepts you’ll want to be familiar with:
Subject-verb agreement
Pronoun-antecedent agreement
Usage of commas and other types of punctuation
Parallelism
Logical comparison
Modifiers
Prepositions
Articles
Idioms
Commonly confused words
If there are any of these that you know you need to review, read those sections of the tutorials. Then, as you’re going through the quizzes, whenever you miss a question you should find the section that talks about that concept and review it.
Good luck!