SAT Topics: Standard English Conventions

This is the section on English mechanics, or grammar and punctuation. These questions and their answer choices are always brief, and you can recognize any question in this category by the words Standard English in the question prompt. These questions give many students trouble at first, but once you learn the rules and recognize the patterns, they are among the easiest, briefest, and safest on the test.

Which of These Things is Not Like the Other? — One helpful general strategy in the Standard English category is to be on the lookout for three answers of one kind and one answer of another. With verb and pronoun questions, look for three singular words and one plural word or vice-versa. With punctuation questions, keep your eyes open for three weak joints (comma or no punctuation) and one strong joint (period, semicolon, colon, or comma+conjunction) or vice versa. The odd man out is usually (though not always) the correct answer. If you want to confirm that it's correct, you can use your suspicions to help you track down the correct answer more quickly. (With pronouns, find the antecedent that goes with the pronoun and make sure it has the proper number, i.e. singular or plural. With verbs, find the subject that is doing the action the verb expresses. With boundaries, determine whether the sentence chunks on either side of the joint are independent clauses or not.)

Simplifying Sentences — Another helpful skill is to throw away everything you don't need in large, messy, complicated sentences. The SAT writers try to confuse and distract you by filling sentences with all kinds of extra fluff (parenthetical comments, introductory phrases, lots of unnecessary modifiers and qualifiers), but if you can develop the skill of ignoring all the distractions and re-reading the huge sentences as simpler sentences, the correct answer will often be much clearer. With compound sentences, develop the skill of finding the clauses and reading the spine of each clause as simply as possible.

The College Board divides the Standard English Conventions category into two sub-categories: Form, Structure, and Sense and Boundaries. The former contains grammar questions regarding verbs, pronouns, and dangling modifiers, as well as apostrophe questions. The latter contains all punctuation questions other than those involving apostrophes. This boundaries categories involves marks of separation that function like joints in a skeleton and mark the boundaries between clauses and other major components of large, complicated sentences.

Form, Structure, and Sense

Number Agreement — Half of the verb and pronoun questions have to do with number agreement, i.e. singular versus plural. If you notice that three of the pronouns are singular and one is plural, or vice versa, focus your attention on the odd man out. It's probably the correct answer. To confirm, look for the noun that the pronoun stands for, or the noun that is doing the action described by the verb. If the noun is singular, the verb or pronoun that refers to it must be singular as well, and vice versa.

True Verbs versus Verbals — If it looks like a verb question, but you notice that some of the words end in -ing or -ed, or one of them has the extra word to in front of the verb, then it's probably an issue of true verb versus verbal or modified verb. Sometimes words that look like verbs are actually not. They come from verbs, but they were modified to act as nouns or adjectives instead. (These are technically known as gerunds, participles, and infinitives, but we can refer to them collectively as verbals.) These verb-like words are actually working as nouns or adjectives instead of verbs. If you notice three true verbs and one verbal, or vice versa, the odd man out is probably the correct answer. To confirm, try to decide whether you need a true verb in the blank, or a descriptive adjective or noun.

Verb Tense — If you notice that the verbs in the answer choices have different tenses — two are in the present tense, one is in the past, and one is in the future, or whatever — then look at the rest of the paragraph. If it's a story in the past, you probably need to pick the past tense verb. If the sentence is making a prediction about the future, you need to pick the future tense. And so on.

Possessive Pronouns vs. Contractions — Do you know the difference between its and it's, "their" and "they're", and "whose" and "who's"? If so, you can handle half of the apostrophe questions. The former words, the ones without apostrophes, are possessive pronouns. They don't refer to anything directly; they are describing something else. They have another noun after them, and they are describing the origin or the owner of the following noun. The latter words, the ones with apostrophes, are contractions. They are shortened, contracted ways of writing it is, they are and who is.

Dangling Descriptors — Every once in a while, you'll see a question in the grammar and punctuation section of the test that looks a little different from the others. The answer choices are all long, and they look like reworded versions of each other. Whenever you see this, look for the following pattern: Introductory Description, _______________. If the subject of the sentence is something other than the thing being described in the introductory description, that's a sentence glitch. It's a mismatch between the two pieces of the sentence. You need to figure out what is being described in the introduction, and then pick the answer choice that makes that thing the subject of the sentence.

Boundaries

These are all of the punctuation questions, apart from apostrophes. The issue is always the proper way to find and mark the boundaries between clauses and the other major chunks of a sentence. These are all of the marks of separation that we use to mark the major joints between major building blocks of large, complex sentences.

Sentence Endings — Some questions in the easy category have to do with questions, but few people have trouble with these. If you can tell the difference between a question (Is the Earth round?) and a statement about a question (He wondered if the Earth is round.), you probably won't have any trouble with these.

Prepositions — Being able to recognize prepositions (for, to, of, in, by, after, etc.) and their phrases (in the sky, for Pete's sake, of the Board of Directors) will be helpful. Prepositional phrases work like adjectives. They need to work as a single unit and they should not be separated from the noun that they modify. So there should never be any mark of punctuation after a preposition, and there probably shouldn't be any punctuation before the preposition, either.

Parenthetical Expressions — It can be very helpful to learn to recognize optional extra bits of supplementary information that have been stuck into the middles of sentences, because they occur frequently on the SAT. If you suspect a piece of a sentence is a parenthetical expression, try throwing it away and see if the sentence still makes sense. In grammar questions, recognizing parenthetical expressions can be helpful, because you can usually ignore them, eliminating a distraction and making the sentence simpler. In punctuation questions, you always need a matched pair of bookends, like literal parentheses, to surround the parenthetical expression. (Notice the pair of commas around like literal parentheses in the previous sentence.) A pair of dashes and a pair of commas will both work, depending on how complicated the expression is. Any time you see a pair of dashes on the SAT, they are almost certainly surrounding a parenthetical expression.

Clauses — This is the major sub-category within Boundaries. Whenever you see a blank in the middle of a long series of words, a good place to begin is to start looking for independent clauses, i.e. chunks of the sentence that would be able to stand on their own as independent sentences. If you have two independent clauses, one on each side of the blank, you need a strong joint, i.e. a period, a semicolon, a colon, or a comma plus a conjunction. If you have an independent clause on one side and lesser fluff on the other, then you are working with the Intro, Main Idea pattern, which requires a comma, or the Main Idea, Followup pattern, which requires either a comma or a dash. In some cases, you might not have an independent clause on either side, in which case the SAT is trying to split apart a single, simple, non-compound sentence, and the correct answer is probably the one with no punctuation.