Aaron of Prepped and Polished talks about the 5 most common punctuation mistakes students make on the SAT and ACT tests.

5 Punctuation Mistakes to Avoid

The number one punctuation mistake that many students make is forgetting to read the whole sentence. Don’t just limit yourself to the underlying portion. A lot of times, if we just look at what’s underlined and try to fix that, we’re actually making simple errors because there might be something in the underlying portion of the text.

Another mistake that we sometimes find is students don’t really understand all the time about different parts of speech. It’s important to know how prepositions, nouns, pronouns, and even verbs affect the use of commas in a sentence.

Another mistake that students make is that they don’t mark out the differences in the answer choices. It’s really important when you see punctuations coming up in a question; you should just take time to mark out where those commas, semicolons, colons, dashes,
apostrophes are being used and where they’re not.

Another mistake to avoid on either side of the test are knowing those unique punctuation marks, the dashes, the colons, and the semicolons. If you don’t know it, then you should know it.

Another type of specific punctuation marker that a lot of students are sometimes confused about is how they are supposed to use an apostrophe.

What was your biggest takeaway from this podcast about Five Common Punctuation Mistakes to Avoid on the SAT and ACT? Do you have any questions for Aaron and Alexis Avila?

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