You may already be familiar with idioms from your study of a foreign language. It’s typically a phrase that, when translated or taken literally, makes no sense. We have idioms in English as well. However, the idioms tested on the Writing portion of the SAT are of a very different sort.

Idioms are special phrases or expressions that determine whether a certain word is allowed or required to follow another word. For instance, you should only say ‘on the one hand’ if you also say later ‘on the other hand.’ You can never say ‘either’ without also saying ‘or.’ It makes sense to say: “John is either at the library or napping.” It doesn’t make sense to say: “John is either at the library.”

In addition to these “phrase pairings,” the SAT loves prepositional idioms. There are certain verbs that can only be paired with specific prepositions. For example, you can be “preoccupied with a book”, but never “preoccupied at a book”, or “for a book.” You could believe in a dream, capitalism or ghosts, but you wouldn’t believe at ghosts or with ghosts or about ghosts.

There is very little formalized logic behind certain verb-preposition pairings. Idioms in any form are expected to be learned by instinct, as a native speaker with a feel for the language and what is “right,” rather than according to strict grammar rules. Your best approach is to start making a list of idioms, either from your reading, practice SATs or the internet and memorize them. Review the list and get a feel for what is acceptable and what is not.

QUICK TIP: Here’s a short list to get you started!

You may be familiar with the concept of parallelism from your English class, but in case you’re not, here’s a quick overview. Parallelism is one of the most common concepts tested on the Writing section of the SAT, and one of the easiest errors to spot, once you know what to look for.

You’ll find parallelism errors in one of three places: lists, grammatical comparisons and factual comparisons. The rule of thumb in parallelism is: the items in a comparison or list must be of the same type, both grammatically and physically.

You’ll probably catch the mistake in this sentence: I enjoy biking, skiing, and to go on vacation. “To go” is in infinitive form, while the other activities are gerunds—they must all be gerunds, according to parallelism. I enjoy biking, skiing and vacationing would be correct. Or even I enjoy biking, skiing and going on vacation would be acceptable.

Your grammar ear is pretty adept at picking up these mistakes. However, the place where the SAT tends to stash its difficult parallelism errors is factual comparisons.

Unlike the other parallelism errors, faulty comparisons do not involve grammatical errors. Instead, a faulty comparison tries to contrast objects of different sorts. It is wrong to say: “My cat is faster than Amy.”

Instead one should say, “My cat is faster than Amy’s horse.” Or one could more tersely say “my cat is faster than Amy’s.” (The possessive grammatically implies the cat).

This type of error can be very difficult to pick up because your brain unconsciously makes the correction as you read. Because your mind reads for content and understanding, not grammar, you’ll have no problem understanding the meaning of the sentence, evens as the grammatical error passes you by.

QUICK TIP: Be on the lookout for comparisons. Your brain’s leniency toward bad grammar means that you need to read word for word, tracing your finger under the words if necessary.

The Holy Grail of Sentence Errors in the SAT Writing section are subject-verb agreements…

Or rather, the Holy Grail of Sentence Errors is subject-verb agreement.

For those of you who didn’t catch the mistake in the opening, this tip is for you!

The SAT loves testing you on subject-verb agreement—on everything about subject-verb agreement, from number to pronouns to gender. As the name of the grammar concept implies, the subject and its matching verb must agree in all ways at all times!

Seems pretty simple, huh? The writers at the SAT have two favorite ways of tripping you up when it comes to subject-verb agreement: interruption and inversion. Your first and most important task is find the subject and its matching verb, which can be trickier than you think. Be assured, the subject will never be a part of a phrase set off by commas. Take a look at this incorrect sentence which uses “interruption”:

The koala bear, which holds a striking resemblance to bears, are not actually bears.

Notice three things about this sentence. First, between the subject and the verb you’ll find an intervening clause, set off with commas. Second, although the subject is singular (“koala”), the nouns in the intervening clause (“bears”) are plural. Third, the verb is plural: it therefore agrees with the nouns in the interrupting clause but not with the true subject (the singular koala bear). This is ETS’ main trick: separate the noun and its verb with a long, descriptive, distracting phrase (often set off by commas), fill that phrase with nouns that are the opposite of the subject (whether singular or plural), and then add a verb that agrees with the phrase nouns, NOT with the subject. By the time you get to the verb in the sentence, it’ll have been so long since you laid eyes on the actual subject, that the subject-verb disagreement will just pass you by. BE WARY OF THESE LONG DESCRIPTIVE PHRASES! BE WARY OF ANY CLAUSE SET OFF BY COMMAS! THEY ARE SIMPLY DISTRACTIONS!

Another, somewhat less common, way that subject-verb disagreement is disguised on the SAT is through the inversion of sentence order. Normally, the subject comes before the verb, but it is possible to put the verb before the subject. Consider:

In the Greek system of letters there are a vowel called epsilon.

The subject of this sentence is the singular noun ‘vowel.’ You can make this fact apparent by crossing out the prepositional phrases:

In the Greek system of letters there are a vowel called epsilon.

This is clearly erroneous; it should read “there is a vowel…”.

Inverted sentences tend to use the verb ‘to be’ in one of its manifestations (‘am,’ ‘are,’ ‘is,’ ‘was,’ ‘were,’ ‘will be’). They also tend to start with prepositional phrases. If you keep these two facts in mind, you should be able to detect subject-verb disagreement in inverted sentences.

QUICK TIP: Work hard to locate subjects and their matching verbs. Be aware they can often be separated by long phrases and often inversed in the sentence. If you correctly cross out “unnecessary” information, such as prepositional phrases and descriptive clauses, the sentence will still retain most of its meaning, and it will be clear whether the subject and verb agree.

In 2005, the SAT I was reconfigured and the SAT Writing portion was added for the first time.  The Writing portion is an area your parents and even older siblings will know almost nothing about.  Make sure to know what you’re in for!

The SAT I has three Writing sections—two of them are multiple choice, and the other is an impromptu essay.

The Essay will always be Section 1.  You will be given a short prompt – usually a yes-or-no question about ethics – and then asked to write a two-page response.  You will have 25 minutes.  It’s important to be in “essay writing mode” when you first show up for the test, and then be able to switch gears afterward for the other sections.

There are three types of questions in the first multiple choice section:

(1)    Sentence Improvement (questions 1-11),
(2)    Error Identification (questions 12-29), and
(3)    Paragraph Improvement (questions 30-35).

All three test your understanding of standard English grammar.  You will be asked to identify grammatical errors, re-phrase sentences or phrases, and edit a short passage for both grammar and clarity.

At the end of the test, you will see section 10, which is a 10-minute, 14-question multiple choice section involving only sentence improvement questions.

Obviously, sentence improvement questions are the primary focus of the test, so they should be your primary focus for studying.  Fortunately, sentence improvement questions are also the easiest to prepare for!  In fact, the concepts tested in sentence improvement also appear in the other types of questions, so by studying one, you’re really preparing for every multiple choice question.