SAT Verbal Instructor Terri of Prepped & Polished, LLC in South Natick, Massachusetts gives a comprehensive overview of the four most important SAT sentence completion strategies.
Today, I’m going to share some strategies with you to help you solve sentence completions on the SAT.
Sentence completions are part of the critical reading section along with reading comprehension passages. Sentence completions are multiple choice questions that test your ability to see how parts of a sentence relate. You have to choose the word or words that, when inserted into the sentence, best fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole. There will be 19 sentence completion questions divided into three groups of eight, six, and five. Within each group, the level of difficulty equals from easy, which is kind of a warm-up to hard. About half the questions, there’ll be one word missing, and the other half will be two words missing.
Mastery of sentence completions hinges on your understanding of sentence logic or main idea, your vocabulary level, and applying for specific strategies that I’m going to introduce to you today.
Strategy 1: Use logic
Use logic to predict the missing word or words. You can cover the answer choices and anticipate what the missing words might be.
Strategy 2: Find clues in the sentence
There’s always a clue or clues that point you in the direction of the best answer, and it really helps to underline keywords and phrases.
Strategy 3: Determine connotation of the missing word
Determine the connotation of the missing word. Is it positive or negative? This is especially helpful in difficult long sentences.
Strategy 4: Plug in answer choices and eliminate
This is particularly good with long, difficult sentences. Double blanks: if one blank doesn’t make sense, you can eliminate it. Use all the clues that I’ve shown you to eliminate and guess intelligently when you get down to 50/50
Bonus tip
Remember to always read a sentence after you’ve plugged in the answer choice or choices to see if it makes sense.
I hope these strategies will help you to solve sentence completions on the SAT. Keep improving your vocabulary, as you can see; having a good vocabulary certainly helps. However, if that’s not your strongest suit, apply these four tried-and-true strategies that I showed you today. They will help you get your best score on that section of the SAT sentence completion section.
Good luck
Do you struggle with sentence completions? Which of Terri’s SAT sentence completion strategies did you find most helpful?
Post your tips/comments below.
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