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The Writing Section of the SAT
Strategies for the Multiple Choice
Questions
What the Writing Section Measures
• Your ability to communicate ideas clearly• Your ability to improve pre-existing writing• Your ability to recognize sentence level
errors• Your ability to recognize grammatical
elements and how they relate to other sentences
• Your ability to improve the coherence of ideas within and among paragraphs
How to Approach the Multiple Choice Questions
• Read the directions carefully, and then follow them.
• Look carefully at answer explanations in your book, even if you answered a question correctly. You may learn something new.
• Eliminate to choices you are sure are wrong when you are not sure of the answer.
How is the Writing Section Scored?
• You will be given two subscores: a multiple choice subscore that will range from 20-80 and an essay score that will range from 2-12.
• The multiple choice score is roughly 70% of your writing score and the essay makes up around 30% of your score.
The Types of Questions Asked
• The multiple choice questions fall into one of three different categories:
• Improving Sentences—recognizing and writing clear, effective and accurate sentences
• Identifying Sentence Errors—knowing grammar, usage, word choice and idioms will be key
• Improving Paragraphs—understanding how sentences work together in order to revise and edit
Approaches to Improving Sentences
• Read the entire sentence before you look at the choices. Choice A is always the same as the original, so selecting this option is the same as saying no error or no change.
• Remember that the right answer will be the one CORRECT version among the five choices. This is different from the Identifying Sentence Errors section.
• Read the choice along with the rest of the sentence—don’t isolate the answer out of context.
• Look for common problem areas in sentences—noun/verb agreement, parallelism, placement of modifiers and the use of relative clauses.
• Read more slowly than you normally do to prevent your brain from automatically making sentence corrections or improvements.
• Mark the questions you are unsure of in your test booklet and return to them when you’ve finished the rest of the test.
Put the Strategies to Use
• Turn to page 145 in your text. Complete the sample Improving Sentences questions 1-3. Keep the strategies that we just discussed in mind while you do so.
Approaches to Identifying Sentence Errors
• Read each sentence quickly, but carefully.• Consider each question as a series of
True/False questions.• Read aloud while you are working through
practice questions. Your trained ear will help you to recognize errors.
• Examine the underlined choices, A through D and consider what type of correction might be needed.
• Look for the most common mistakes people make in grammar: subject/verb agreement, pronoun agreement, and adjective/adverb confusion.
• Look for errors in idiom—words or phrases that are particular to our language. We say we listen to someone, not listen at someone. We say a song is by a composer, not a song is from a composer.
• Remember that some sentences have No Errors.
• Move quickly through the Identifying Sentence Error questions. The other sections will require more time.
• Mark questions in your test booklet that you’ve skipped to return to later—move forward
Approaches to Improving Paragraphs
• After you read a short draft of an essay, you will be asked questions on ways to edit and revise the given text.
• Read the essay thoroughly to determine its overall meaning before you look at the questions. Understand the big picture.
• Read more slowly than you usually do to help you pay close attention.
• Try all of the options before making your selection. The directions say to choose the BEST answer. There will be more than one answer that is satisfactory.
• Make sure that your answer about a particular sentence or sentences, make sense in context with the preceding and following sentences.
• Again, mark in your test booklet any question you need to return to if time allows.
Put the Strategies to Use
• On pages 178-179, a draft of an essay has been provided to you for your critique. Answer questions 1-6, Improving Paragraphs, to practice the strategies we’ve just discussed.