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Overview of the Writing Section

The Writing Section includes four parts: 1. the Essay, 2. Identifying Sentence Errors, 3. Improving Sentences, and 4. Improving Paragraphs.

1. The Essay

For help with the essay, click here for our SAT Essay Pro, Dr. Preston Coleman. He’s a communications professor who’s been involved in the assessment of student essays since 1991. Dr. Coleman has evaluated tens of thousands of essays, including the SAT’s, and has worked with Pearson Educational Services and the University of Georgia’s Test Scoring and Reporting Services.

2. Identifying Sentence Errors, or, Finding Flaws

by Michael D. Davis

If only we were as good at identifying flaws in written English as we were at identifying flaws in each other!!

Well, the good news is that I can help you with the Identifying Sentence Errors part. The other would be a skill better left undeveloped! The folks at ETS are experts at generating sentences that look perfectly fine, but have some minor error in them. Yes, they’ll throw you an occasional bone and give you a sentence that looks like it was written by a six-year-old. Those are easy. The killer is when they give you a perfectly normal sounding sentence that has a mistake in it.

The problem with this section is rooted in the fact that the vast majority of us speak differently from the way we write. No one, for example, says “It is I.”  This, however, is correct English, even though we all say “It’s me.”  

Here’s an example from an actual test:

The union (A) insisted on an increase in (B) their  (C) members’ starting pay, and threatened to call a strike if the company  (D)refused to meet the demand. (E) No error. 

Everthing seems ok, right? If I were to say this to you, you would not think there was anything wrong with it. However, the answer is (B) their. Why?  Because “Union” is a singular noun. So their needs to be replaced with its.

There is a large number of nouns that we think of as plural when they are actually singular (such as each, every, any, everyone, anyone, anybody, and on and on). Notice that previous sentence! Some might want to correct me and say, “There are a large number of nouns. . .” That would be incorrect because the subject is number of nouns, not just nouns. Number is singular.

Another thing to beware of is that the test writers also love to give sentences that have no errors, but nonetheless just don’t sound right. Again, this is rooted in the fact that we speak very differently from the way we write. Sometimes a correctly written sentence seems wrong because it’s not the way we would say it! This is basically the same problem as mentioned above, but from a different angle.

Here’s a good example:

The young fish (A) were very tiny, yet each of (B) them ate many times (C) its own (D) weight in solid food every day. (E)No error.

Many students will be tempted to go with (C), thinking it should be their instead of its. Its, however, is absolutely correct! So the answer is (E).

Two other parts of the Writing section that basically test the same aforementioned skills, just in different ways, are Improving Sentences and Improving Paragraphs. I always start with the sentence error section first because once you have the skills for this, you also basically have what you need for the other two. Improving Sentences is closely related to Identifying Sentence Errors, in that both require you to recognize grammatical flaws. The only difference is that in the Improving Sentences section, there’s an extra step:  you not only have to find what’s wrong, but you also replace it with the correction, if one needs to be made at all. Improving Paragraphs then takes it to another level—not only will you need to recognize grammatical errors, but you’ll also have to fix the sentence in such a way that it is correct in and of itself and also in context with surrounding sentences. The root of all of these, however, is being able to recognize a number of basic errors.

I have a lot of resources for this section and I’ve put together a list of about thirty of the most common grammatical errors. All of these mistakes will be found on this section at some point or another—some types of errors appear over and over again, some once or twice. We’ll learn all of them, but will focus on the errors that the test writers tend to emphasize.

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