Tips for SAT Sentence Error Questions

Alexis Avila Founder/President of Prepped & Polished offers advice on how to avoid careless mistakes on the SAT Sentence Error Questions on the SAT Writing Grammar Section.

Before circling an answer because it sounds wrong, come up with a valid replacement for the incorrect grammar.

18 out of the 49 grammar questions on the SAT are sentence error questions. What a lot of students do, of all levels, is they tend to read the question, and then if something sounds funny in the sentence, they’ll circle the answer, and then they’ll just move on.

If you want to avoid careless mistakes on the sentence error portion of the test, you have to work really methodically. So, this is what I recommend that you do with sentence error questions. You want to first read the sentence and narrow in on the bad grammar.

“Martha is the woman who sat on the couch between you and I at the meeting and who kept asking questions about American Idol.”

Well, we know that after a preposition between, you can’t have the subject case pronoun after a preposition. So this is what I want you to do. Instead of just choosing B because it sounds funny, I want you to really know why we are going to choose B. So, I want you to have a valid replacement for the answer.

So after the preposition between, the pronoun shouldn’t be you and I; it should be you and me. You need the object case form of the pronoun after a preposition. So, before you actually go ahead and choose B, I want you to slash the incorrect answer, slash the mistake, and replace it with the correct grammar. Then, choose B and move on confidently through the sentence error portion of the test. So do those things, and I guarantee you’ll avoid careless mistakes on sentence errors.

I’ll talk to you soon.

Did you find this SAT Grammar tip helpful? What are some other ways to avoid careless grammar mistakes on the SAT?

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