The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar is Now Available (Again)!

After much agonizing and hand-wringing (not to mention three more proof copies), I have finally and once again deemed The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar acceptable for general consumption.

And because in my utter haste to get the book done with I somehow neglected to thank Debbie Stier in my acknowledgements for all her help and willingness to suffer through the final revision stages with me, I'm saying it here: thank you for everything, especially for persuading me that it was actually time to let the damn thing go.

For a preview of the revised version, please see my preview page at:  http://ultimatesatverbal.blogspot.com/p/preview-ultimate-guide-to-sat-grammar.html

And if you'd like to purchase it, click here.

And now, some thoughts about letting go of my work:

A couple of months ago, while I was helping someone prep for the AP English Lit. exam, I stumbled across the poem "The author to her book" written by Anne Bradstreet. Although the poem was written in Puritan New England more than three centuries ago, it expresses authorial sentiments that for me seem to transcend all those hundreds of years. I'm going to restrain myself from quoting the entire thing (especially since anyone who just took the AP Lit exam probably does NOT want to be reading yet more 17th century poetry), but some of it I think is so fantastic that I just can't resist:

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge)...

The visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could...

In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

I think that anyone who has ever published anything can relate to the sentiment of overwhelming terror and embarrassment that inevitably comes with putting work on display for public consumption. Unless, of course, they're an overhwelming egotist, which I'm going to assume most people are not (although the act of publishing anything does, I think, inevitably contain an element of egotism.)  I'm always shocked when people I know ask for a copy. And sound excited to read it. Do they not understand that I wrote a grammar book. And for the SAT -- the most hated test in America -- nonetheless! Why on earth would they want to read it? They've been done with the SAT for years!

That notwithstanding, I'm always glad to inspire people to sharpen their grammatical skills, SAT or no SAT. But do me a favor: if you get the book and find any mistakes, please wait a month or two before you tell me. I really need to spend some time recovering before I get to work on the second edition. 

Just because an answer is confusing doesn't mean it's wrong

One of things I've noticed recently is that when doing SAT Critical Reading, a lot of my students are very quick to cross out answers that sound excessively abstract or complicated without trying to understand them fully. I do understand the impulse: if you think you pretty much understand what a passage is saying and an answer does not, at first glance, seem obviously related to anything directly stated by the author, it would stand to reason that it's probably not the answer.

Unfortunately, however, it doesn't always work that way.

One of the things I try make as explicit as possible when I start working with someone is the fact that Critical Reading questions often require you to first determine information very, very literally, then take a step back and re-cast that same information in much more general or abstract terms. That's why the answers are often worded in ways that are 1) completely unexpected, and that 2) often seem to bear little relationship to what's actually being stated in the passage.

In general, a good rule of thumb is that you should never eliminate an answer simply because you find it confusing or don't really understand what it means; and likewise, you should never pick an answer just because you do understand what it's saying. Whether or not you understand an answer has exactly zero impact on its likelihood of being either correct or incorrect. Practically speaking, that means that if you've eliminated three choices and are stuck between an answer you do understand and an answer you don't, the latter must be correct -- regardless of how little sense it makes to you -- if the former doesn't work.

So when you come across an answer that seems to be worded in a highly abstract manner, the first thing you need to do is try to figure out what it's actually saying. Ideally, you should have already gone back to the passage and formulated an answer in your own words, in which case you need to think hard about whether the answer on the page might simply be a more general version of what you came up with. If you haven't gone back to the passage...well, you might have to do it by process of elimination. But if you're willing to entertain all the possibilities and resist jumping to conclusions, that can be very effective as well.

A Standardized-Testing Argument for Majoring in the Liberal Arts

Although I'm a strong believer in the importance of the liberal arts and in learning for the sake of learning during college, I'm not going to bore you with a rehashed version of those arguments. That's not the point of this post. Instead, I'd like to talk about things from a slightly more pragmatic standpoint: standardized testing for graduate school. 


In addition to the SAT and ACT, I also tutor the Verbal portions of the GRE and the GMAT, and every summer, I inevitably end up with a couple of recent college graduates who want to apply to graduate school and who have no choice but to jump back into the perilous waters of standardized-testing. So not only do I routinely deal with high school seniors freaking out about where they're going to go to college, but I also get to teach college seniors and recent graduates freaking out about where they'e going to go to grad school. 


If you're a high school student reading this, let me explain how it works: in order to apply to graduate programs in most fields, you are required to take the GRE (Graduate Record Exam), which is essentially a more difficult version of the SAT. It's just been revamped to eliminate the analogy section, so the essential exercises are now pretty much those on the SAT: sentence completions and reading comprehension passages. They're now structured a little differently, but the basic skills tested are the same.


If you want to apply to business school, you are generally required to take the GMAT (although more and more B-schools are accepting the GRE), whose Verbal portion includes critical reading passages, sentence corrections similar to the ones on the SAT Writing section, and critical reasoning passages, which involve identifying the assumptions on which an argument is based, as well as the information necessary to strengthen or weaken it.


(There's also the MCAT for med school, the DAT for dental school, and the LSAT for law school, but no one's asked me to tutor those...yet.) 


Anyway, if you think SAT Critical Reading is hard, then GRE and GMAT Readings are downright terrifying. Here's an excerpt from a fairly typical GMAT passage:


Two modes of argumentation have been used on behalf of women's emancipation in Western societies. Arguments in what could be called the "relational" feminist tradition maintain the doctrine of "equality in difference," or equity as distinct from equality. They posit that biological distinctions betweeen the sexes result in a necessary sexual division of labor in the family and throughout society and that women's procreative labor is currently undervalued by society, to the disadvantage of women. By contrast, the individualist feminist tradition emphasizes individual human rights and celebrates women's quest for personal autonomy, while downplaying the importance of gender roles and minimizing discussion of childbearing and its attendant responsibilities. 


Hard, right? But then again, if you're in high school, that would be the normal reaction.


One of the interesting things I've noticed, however, is that among my students -- most of whom attended very well-regarded colleges and none of whom majored in a liberal arts field -- every single one has found GRE/GMAT reading to be incredibly daunting. Not only did they have serious problems determining things like main point and tone, but a lot of the time they could barely even discern the topic. Sometimes they couldn't even figure out what the questions were asking. Given that they had attended some excellent programs at highly-ranked schools, I was at first a little surprised by just how much trouble they had. But then I realized that the specialized programs they had gone through simply hadn't equipped them with certain fundamental skills that most liberal arts majors tend to pick up somewhere along the way.  


While it's true that majoring in History or English or Economics (or Anthropology or Sociology or Philosophy, etc.) doesn't give you a fixed set of skills that are directly applicable to a single career, those majors do generally require you to do a lot of reading and writing and analyzing. Furthermore, you get exposed to what academic writing looks and sounds like, and you get familiar enough with its conventions that you can figure out the basics of pretty much anyone's argument -- even if it's in a field you have absolutely no familiarity with (like, say, astrophysics). 


People who major in things like business or speech pathology, on the other hand, tend not to get exposed to that side of academia as much, and as a result, they can actually be in far *worse* shape when it comes to standardized testing for graduate school -- even if they have an undergraduate degree in the same field they want to do graduate work in. They tend to lack the flexible knowledge that allows them to draw rapid connections between ideas and instantaneously decipher the kind of impenetrable academic langage that inevitably appears on graduate entrance exams. For the students I've worked with, such language was quite simply alien. Although they'd spent four years in college, they seemed to have no idea how scholars thought or expressed their ideas. 


I'd never suggest that someone major (or not major) in a particular subject solely for the sake of standardized testing. If business is truly your passion, by all means declare a business major. But if you want to get an MBA eventually, you should be aware that waltzing into a top program -- or even a solid one -- might be a bit harder than you thought. 

Some Tips for Handling Literary Passages on the SAT

Literary passages are among the biggest wild cards on the SAT. Unlike the more straightforward analytical passages, which are pretty much guaranteed to have been written in the past twenty years and which feature a predictably dry academic style, prose fiction passages can be taken from a book published less than a decade ago (e.g. Jumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, which is by the way a phenomenal book that you should absolutely read if you get the chance) or from one published a couple of centuries ago. There's no way to know which one you'll get on a particular test, and it probably isn't worth it to try to predict (although if anyone's done an analysis, I'd certainly be interested to know).

The major thing to remember with literary passages is that even though they don't really have a main point, they do revolve around one essential scenario that you must have a general understanding of in order to answer many of the questions. Typically, the more complex the language in the passage, the broader the questions.

Practically speaking, that means your goal is to get the gist of the action and not sweat the details. If you don't understand exactly what a particular turn of phrase is intended to mean, it's usually not so important as long as you can keep the big picture in mind.

If you're not sure what's going on the first time you read a passage through, don't panic! Panic is your enemy; it leads you to believe that you know less than you actually do. Just ask yourself the following questions:

-Who are the characters?
-Where are they?
-What are they talking about/what is the author describing?
-Do they want the same thing or different things?
-Is there a conflict?
-Do they like each other? Why or why not?

The answers to those questions should be sufficient information to get you to the "point." Do not try to answer them from memory. If you're not 100% sure, go back to the text and check it out. Actually, even if you think you are 100% sure, go back to the text and check it out anyway.

On the other hand, passages written in more lucid, contemporary language tend to contain more "detail" questions, so in addition to the above, you need to pay particular attention to any words not used in their normal way (often in quotes or italicized) and to any major literary devices (such as metaphors or personification) that the author uses. Try to notice these as you read through the passage, and try to figure out why the author is using them before you look at the questions. But remember: your goal is never to interpret. As soon as you go outside the bounds of what's explicitly being said, it's all over.

Regardless of what sort of book the passage comes from, though, you still want to make sure to take note of the major transitions. They're still giving you the relationships between ideas, and so they're still important.

Don't Guess, Figure It Out

I'm not opposed to guessing on the SAT. Really I'm not. If you're actually taking the test, find yourself stuck between two answers, and have a really strong sense that it might be one of them, I generally say to go for it. In my experience, most people have pretty decent instincts, and even if they can't always put their finger on just why the answer is the answer, their gut instincts usually turns out to be right. In those cases, not guessing is more of a problem.

What I'm opposed to is the notion that the SAT should be treated like some sort of guessing game; that just because there are multiple answers, it shouldn't be necessary to actually learn how to answer the questions; and that SAT prep should primarily consist of learning how to eliminate answers and play the odds, hoping that if you can get rid of a couple of answers, you'll get lucky enough to hit the right one often enough to get you a decent score.

The problem with that approach is that it fails to recognize the relationship between question and answer. And as I've said before, the presence of multiple answer choices doesn't make the right answer any less right or the process of actually learning how to answer the questions any less necessary. The highest scorers, the ones who score 750 and above, aren't the best guessers -- they're the ones who know how to figure out the answers for real. In order to accept that idea in regard to Critical Reading, however, you must first accept that the answers aren't simply a matter of opinion and that there is actually a concrete, logical process that one can employ in order to arrive at the correct one. Once you've done that, you're on your way.

So what this boils down to is one very simple piece of advice: when you're studying for the SAT and come across a question you're unsure of how to answer, don't guess! Stop timing yourself, forget about finishing the section, and try to work through the question.

Experiment -- if one approach doesn't work, try something else. If you're doing reading, keep going back and forth between the passage and the question. Someone recently sent me one of the hardest CR questions I've ever seen, and I must have gone back and forth about twenty times, no exaggeration. No matter how frustrated I got, I kept reminding myself to stick to the process, and eventually I arrived at the answer.

One thing I have to occasionally remind my students of is that I'm not some sort of magician when it comes to the SAT. Even though I can often answer questions almost instantaneously, I'm still going through the entire process of figuring out exactly what the question is asking, going back to the text, summing up the answer in my own words, and writing it down -- I'm just doing it really fast. But I almost never skip steps, and when I do, I sometimes get questions wrong (at which point I hold myself up as an example of why you should never skip steps). Occasionally, I also start from faulty premises and work through an entire question, only to discover that the answer I've come up with isn't there. At that point, I start all over by reevaluating my initial assumption, and I usually make my students watch me rework the question from scratch, just to show them that sometimes there actually isn't a shortcut.

But regardless, chances are, any form of logic you apply to the question will get you somewhere. The SAT is in part designed to test whether you can use the knowledge you do have to deduce the answers to material that is in all likelihood unfamiliar. The College Board doesn't necessary expect you to have memorized the definition of "multifarious," but they do expect you to be able to figure out that "multi" means "many" and make an educated guess based on that knowledge.

The bottom line is that you need to practice developing the idea that the SAT isn't about guessing. When you don't see the answer immediately, you're far better served by stopping and thinking the question through carefully and methodically than by leaping to guess. If you have to spend half an hour on a single question, fine. You'll get faster eventually. All that counts is that you learn something process-related that you can apply to working through other questions in the future. Otherwise, to invoke the old cliché, you're just spinning your wheels.

Be as literal as you possibly can (SAT Critical Reading)

Occasionally, the College Board comes out with a question that is so utterly diabolical in its simplicity that I have to give them major kudos for it. Debbie Stier sent me this question, and when I first looked at it, I was puzzled for a moment, but when the answer hit me, I felt obliged to post about. It's one of the best illustrations I've ever seen of just how absolutely and completely literal it is necessary to be when doing SAT Critical Reading questions. 

I really cannot emphasize this point enough: in order to understand anything about the role a detail or piece of information plays within the context of a passage, you must first try to understand what is says as precisely as possible. If you go even a centimeter beyond what the author says, you can easily fall into the realm of speculation and miss things that are right under your nose. 

Here goes: 

When we came home, Aunt Sylvie would certainly be

home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her

habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was part of her special time of

day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think

(5) she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. 

She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising

a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in

a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship's cabin.

She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to

exclude.

9. The reference to Aunt Sylvie's pronunciation in line 4 serves to

(A) capture a distinctive regional dialect

(B) highlight a double meaning of a word

(C) provide an ominous foreshadowing

(D) underscore a particular misconception

(E) give evidence of a contrary personality 

First, let's examine some traps that someone could easily fall into: A can be eliminated pretty easily because it's completely outside the scope of the passage, but C seems like it might be able to work. After all,  darkness is usually a bad thing in books, and the passage is about darkness, so maybe the author is suggesting that something bad is going to happen. 

D also seems vaguely plausible. It seems kind of weird that someone would want to sit in the dark, and so that's sort of like a misconception. 

E seems like it could work for the same reason. Most people don't want to sit in the dark, and so someone who wants to do so must be contrary, right? 

But here's how you actually solve it: 

Remember the whole reading word-by-by word thing I talked about in my last post? This is how it works, and I hope the answer to this question illustrates just how absolutely necessary it is.

What does the author say about Aunt Sylvie's pronunciation in line 4? That she gave the word "evening"  three syllables: e-ven-ing. That's it, the only information we have to go on.

Now, literally, "evening" of course means "the time when it gets dark out," but when used as a verb (ok, technically a gerund), it means "to make even," literally "to smooth" (as the author states in line 5) or to remove inconsistencies from a surface.  In other words, the word "evening" has two meanings, and the author calls attention to Aunt Sylvie's pronunciation in order to call attention to (highlight) that fact. 

The answer must therefore be B. 

Why good grades in English do not always correlate with high SAT Verbal scores

For many people, the tendency to interpret what they read is one of the biggest stumbling blocks they encounter on the SAT. After all, their English teachers have told them for years that reading is about interpreting, thus it seems natural that the College Board would want them to do the same.

It doesn't.

Among the myriad things that never get explained to most people when they first start studying for the SAT is the fact that Critical Reading is not an English test in the sense they've come to understand English in school. As a result, many strong students who have always received high grades in English class are surprised when their Critical Reading scores are barely above average. So if this describes your (or your child's) situation, please consider the following.

First, on the verbal side, the SAT is not a literature test but rather a vocabulary-based reasoning test. It is above all a test about the construction of arguments and the relationships between them. It is most definitely not a test of someone's ability to "interpret" (i.e. speculate about meanings not directly suggested in a text), at least in the way that many high school students have been encouraged to do in school.

This does not mean that the SAT is inherently a bad test, or that doing well on it is only a question of how much test-prep someone receives. I find that there is a widespread tendency to assume that just because schools don't teach the skills tested on the SAT, those skills are 1) inapplicable beyond a standardized-testing context, or 2) unteachable. And implicit in that assumption is the notion that if (outstanding) high schools are not teaching a particular set of skills -- skills that are only tested on the SAT -- then those skills can't possibly be very important.

I'd like to turn that notion on its head and suggest something that many people will probably find very unpalatable, namely that the skills the SAT tests are far more important than those that many students are learning to do in English class. I'd also like to suggest that there are some very important skills that many high school students need to be taught explicitly in order to master, and that high schools -- even very good ones -- are routinely failing to teach.

Chief among these skills is the ability to engage with a text word by word, paying close attention to elements such as diction, syntax, and structure in order to fully comprehend the particular idea that an author is attempting to convey -- not just glancing over a book (or Sparknotes, for that matter) and getting a vague notion about what an author *might* be saying. Working with this level of precision requires an extraordinarily high level of concentration. It also requires that students temporarily put themselves aside and focus exclusively on someone else's intentions -- not, I gather, something that they are routinely asked to do.

This may sound harsh, but I say it based on the following observation: when I ask a student to tell me what an author thinks about a particular topic (or summarize an idea, or tell me what's discussed in a particular section of a passage), he or she almost never returns to the passage in order to read carefully to determine the necessary information but rather begins with, "Well, I feel like it's saying..." And then tells me something well outside the bounds of what's actually written in the text.

Even after I tell them multiple times to look back at the passage, they might do no more than glance over a couple of lines and then tell me that the answer isn't there. And I don't think that it's just a question of laziness; the idea of looking at the passage actually doesn't seem to occur to them. I get the sense that this sort of sustained, rigorous, objective reading is a completely foreign concept.

This is not about teenagers being teenagers either; the French lycée students I've worked with -- students who are actually taught in a system that drills this kind of precision mercilessly -- have absolutely no problem telling me the function of a paragraph in the context of an argument, or the relationship between the first and second sentences in a paragraph. And while anyone who knows me cannot fail to be aware that I have many problems with the French educational system, this is not one of them.

If American students have never been taught to think with this level of rigor, it's no wonder they can't see the relationships between SAT questions and answers, and no wonder that they find the right answers to be arbitrary and only attainable through some mysterious process of elimination.

So who's to blame for this? Teachers at their wits end trying to manage classes of thirty students? School administrators convinced that a laptop for every student and an Internet hookup in every classroom will magically solve every problem? Facebook and other social networking sites for melting teenagers' minds, ruining their ability to concentrate, and seducing them into spending endless hours online? An educational system so terrified of ruining children's self-esteem (and incurring parental ire) that it feels compelled to insist that everyone's opinion is equal and that everything is just a matter of interpretation?

I think it's a confluence of these factors. And as of now, at least, I don't really have any grand solutions, except to tell my students to go back to the text, put their finger on the damn page, and read. every. single. word.

Describing Content vs. Summarizing Arguments

One of the things I've noticed recently is that when they first start working with me, a lot of my students aren't quite clear on the difference between describing the content of a passage and summarizing the argument it contains. Since the ability to summarize arguments quickly, lucidly, and effectively is perhaps the the skill that is most crucial for success on the Critical Reading portion of the SAT, this is a serious problem.

Regardless, once a student has finished reading their first passage, the initial conversation usually goes something like this:

Me: So now I want you to sum up the author's argument in your own words. What's the basic point that he or she is trying to make here?

Student: Well, the author talks about x... and then he sort of mentions y...oh yeah, and then there was this thing that he said about z that I didn't really get.

At which point I explain that I'm not interested in hearing a play-by-play recount of what the author says, but rather a condensed version of the main argument he or she is making. I've now gotten so many puzzled looks at that statement that I think I'm just going to nix the question completely and start by explaining the difference.

Most of my students pick it up pretty quickly after I give them some examples and walk them through the steps a couple of times; however, the fact that I seem to be having this conversation repeatedly suggests a couple of thing to me. First, it suggest that schools (at least the ones my students come from) do not ever explicitly teach students the difference between summarizing and arguing. It also suggests that even if the distinction has been covered at some point, they've never been asked to apply it in any meaningful way.

Incidentally, this weakness is not limited to high school students; I've also encountered it with GRE and GMAT students.

Perhaps it's one of those skills that teachers assume students will pick up along the way. Or perhaps that's the sort of test prepp-y trick they pride themselves on avoiding (which is shame because it's really not about test prep). More likely, though, it simply doesn't ever occur to them that it needs to be taught. After all, they understand the difference. (To any teachers who may be reading this, please don't take offense; I'm just describing what I experience.)

Unfortunately, however, there is a very important distinction between giving a description of content and giving a summary of an argument, and on the SAT, not knowing the difference can cost you literally hundreds of points.

Describing Content = recounting the information presented in the text without necessarily distinguishing between main points and supporting evidence and/or counter-arguments. The goal is simply to relate what is being said, often in a very concrete "first x, then y, and finally z" form.

Summarizing an Argument = identifying the essential point that the author wants to convey and eliminating any superfluous detail.  The goal is not to cover all of the information presented or to relate it in the sequence it appears in the passage, but rather to pinpoint the overarching idea that determines the content (supporting details, potential counter-arguments, etc.) of the passage.

Summarizing an argument requires you to make a leap from concrete to abstract because you must move beyond simply recounting the information presented to recognizing which parts of it are of primary vs. secondary importance.

Let's look at an example. I'm going to use the passage from yesterday's post about transitions -- the version with the transitions, of course! My apologies for making you read it again, but hey, no one ever said that SAT passages were chosen for their entertainment value. Besides, there are many, many ways to read any given piece of text. But that's something I'm not going to get into now.

Passage

The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises because they don’t realize how difficult they actually are, yet respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected, as the Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts were later to do. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal also shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt even by the exploited laborers, who still shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers and nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. Despite improvements in sanitation, it was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares, but he also recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. In fact, many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.

Content Description (more or less what I hear when I ask someone to summarize): The author talks about this guy Albert O. Hirschman's "hiding hand" idea, which I think basically says that people don't know how difficult things are when they start but then they find out and overcome them. And then he talks about this documentary called Panama Canal, which showed like about how technology was important in the early 20th century, and how workers were exploited and how awful conditions were for them while they were working. He mentions a guy whose grandfather worked on the Panama Canal, and he says that his grandfather said that it was really bad and stuff... Oh yeah, and then there was something about, uh, decolonization I think, but I don't know if I really got that.

Notice the how vague this version is. It doesn't really distinguish between primary and secondary information; everything gets mushed in together. If this were an SAT passage, the summary would give us zero help in terms of figuring out the main point.

Argument Summary (as I would put it): Workers faced immense obstacles and terrible conditions while working on the Panama Canal but persevered and were inspired to begin decolonization process.

Notice how this version doesn't try to pack in a lot of information -- it just hits the big theme.

Argument Summary in condensed SAT terms: PC workers survived awful conditions --- > decolonization

Now notice how this version cuts out absolutely everything except the absolute total utter bare essentials. It doesn't even attempt to incorporate any sort of detail or anything beyond the main focus of the passage and (awful conditions during the building of the Panama Canal) and its result (the "so what?", the part that tells us why the main focus of the passage is important).

If we were to treat this as a short SAT passage, that effect (it set off the decolonization process) would be our focus. It is mentioned in the last sentence, and the last sentence is where the main point usually is. So in six words and an arrow, we've managed to capture the essential information -- information that we will almost certainly need to answer at least one of the questions.

The Importance of Transitions in the Essay and Elsewhere

In many ways, I think that the Verbal portion of the SAT is fundamentally about transitions. Or at least the Critical Reading and Essay portions of it. Let me explain what I mean by this: the SAT is essentially designed to test your ability to perceive relationships between ideas and arguments.

Do two piece of information discuss the same idea or different ideas? Does one idea build on or support the previous one, or does it contradict it and move the argument in a new direction? Does it emphasize a point? Refute a point? Explain a point?

Transitions are the signposts, so to speak, that make clear (or elucidate) these relationships. Without words such as "and," "for example," and "however," it becomes much more difficult to tease out just what two words (or sentences or paragraphs or passages) have to do with one another. Transitions are thus where Critical Reading and Writing meet -- just as paying attention to transitions can help you follow an author's argument in a reading passage, so can including transitions in your own writing help your reader follow your argument.

Remember: your reader should have to exert as little effort as possible to follow your argument. The harder your reader has to work, the lower your score is likely to be. The relationships among your ideas need to be crystal clear, whether you're talking about your championship soccer team from last season or War and Peace.

Here's an experiment: below are two version of the same passage. I've rewritten the first version in order to remove all the transitions. Read it and try to get the gist. 

No Transitions

The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises. They don’t realize how difficult they are. They respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected. The Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts did this. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt by the exploited laborers, who shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers died. Nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. There were improvements in sanitation. It was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares. He recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. Many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.

You probably got the basic point, but you also probably noticed that that there were places where sentences sat side by side with no obvious logical connection to one another ("There were improvements in sanitation. It was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares.") 

While I've exaggerated here for effect, I do often see students omit transitions between their thoughts in their essays -- particularly between paragraphs -- thereby forcing the reader to scramble to re-situate him/herself in the argument. It's subtler, but there's always a moment of, "Wait, what is this person actually trying to say here?" Don't make your reader go through the equivalent of what you just read. 

Now try it with transitions: 

The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises because they don’t realize how difficult they actually are, yet respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected, as the Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts were later to do. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal also shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt even by the exploited laborers, who still shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers and nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. Despite improvements in sanitation, it was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares, but he also recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. In fact, many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.

A lot easier to understand, right? 

Three short tips for raising the level of your writing (SAT Essay)

As I've written about before, I think that people tend to pay a bit too much attention to their SAT essay examples at the expense of their actual writing. While it is important to have good examples, it also does not matter how good they are or how well they fit the question if your writing itself does not come off as relatively sophisticated.

This is not just about including big words, though the overall level of your vocabulary certainly plays a part. (As an aside, I will admit I've seen truly cringe-worthy 12 essays whose primary merit seemed to be the inclusion of a lot of hefty vocabulary. This does NOT, however, mean that you'll automatically get a high score if you just use lots of big words). The actual structure of your sentences counts too, not just the structure of your essay. So that said, here are a few random tips for kicking things up a notch or two:

1) Alternate the length of your sentences

If you notice that you've just written a sentence that takes up three lines, make the next sentence two or three words long. That kind of deliberate juxtaposition will make it clear that you're in control of your writing and know how to manipulate it for stylistic effect, and it will get your reader's attention.

For example: For centuries, Western culture has uphold the ideal of the the lone genius toiling away in solitude, locked in a laboratory, only to emerge one day with an earth-shattering discovery. It's a myth.

2) Use non-essential clauses in unexpected places

Generally speaking, one of the things that distinguishes adult-level writing from a lot of teenage writing is the inclusion and placement of subordinate clauses. You know those Fixing Sentences questions that include non-essential clauses in places you'd never believe they belonged (e.g. "A cure for cancer, some scientists believe, may be found within the next decade")? You can actually use that kind of structure in your own sentences to make them a little more interesting.

You don't need to do it, and in fact you shouldn't; if you overuse a stylistic device like this, it'll quickly lose its effect and start to sound just plain bad. But once, maybe twice, at key points in the essay (e.g. intro, conclusion) can make a difference.

3) Use more sophisticated synonyms for very common words

This is a useful strategy because it means you'll be able to use the words regardless of the topic. You don't have to go overboard with the flowery language, just use a consistently more elevated tone throughout. Try myriad instead of many, highly instead of very, perhaps instead of maybe, presumably instead of probably, and principally or primarily instead of mainly.

Don't try to justify each answer (SAT Critical Reading)

I think that one of the biggest and most common traps that people fall into on SAT Critical Reading is to approach each answer choice as if it were potentially valid and then try to twist it to fit the question. The problem is that if you look hard enough, you can generally find *something* in at least two or three answers that sounds as if it could potentially be valid. And if you spend your time looking at and pondering the options rather than going back to the passage and trying to figure out *the* answer, chances are you'll just end up confused. It's also likely that you'll forget what the passage actually says and choose an answer that sounds plausible but that is fact completely unsupported by the text.

It helps to keep this in mind: the fact that five answer choices are provided does not mean that the right answer is somehow less right. Your job is to find the answer. Not the best answer, but the answer. It might not be phrased in a way you like. It may also not be the answer you were expecting. But it will be the answer. Studies have shown that multiple-choice test takers who are asked to find the "best" answer score substantially worse than those asked to find the "right" answer. You need to remember this before you start imagining circumstances outside those explicitly stated in the text, under which a given answer could be right.

If you want to see a major increase in your Critical Reading score (100+ points), your job is to learn to identify the general criteria that the correct answer must contain before you look at the answers. I cannot overstate the difference between weighing each answer choice individually and actually looking for something specific. They're two totally different games, and the latter is exponentially more effective.

In order for this technique to truly work, though, you need to learn to identify function as well as literal meaning, but once you've become accustomed to it, there's almost no way you can get the questions wrong.

Always Work in Pencil

I will freely admit that the use of pens during tutoring sessions is one of my biggest pet peeves. In everyday life, I have nothing against them (I actually like them quite a bit), but when it comes to the SAT, I loathe them. I've been known to rummage in my purse for up to five minutes in a desperate attempt to circumvent the necessity of working in ink.

Here why:

When you use a pen, you can't erase things (let's assume we're not talking about erasable pens), and when you can't erase things, you tend to get very cautious about crossing them out. And that can be a major problem.

In order to work most effectively, you need to be free to eliminate answers conclusively, to draw lines all the way through them and totally remove them from consideration. If you work in pen, you probably won't do this.

Because you may not be 100% certain that the answers you're crossing out are in fact wrong, you'll hesitate and cross out just part of the answer, or worse just cross out the letter. And if you do that, you will get distracted. Sooner or later, you'll overlook the "x" you made and start to reconsider the options you actually crossed out.

At best, you'll waste some time looking at options you already eliminated. At worst, you might accidentally misread and fill in a wrong letter. On the other hand, if you truly cross everything out the answer out, the chances of this happening are much, much lower. But you probably won't truly cross things out unless you get a pencil. It doesn't matter if it's a #2. And if you're really in the mood to take  a walk on the wild side, it can even be mechanical;)

Summarizing Content vs. Identifying Function (SAT Critical Reading)

One of the things that people preparing for the SAT often find very difficult to grasp is the difference between summarizing the content of a set of lines or paragraph, and describing the function of that content within the passage as a whole.

Very frequently, I'll ask someone what role a particular piece of information is playing within the author's argument, only to be given a summary of what the author says instead.

Let me be absolutely clear: content and function are two completely different things. You cannot understand function without understanding content, but understanding content alone is not enough to understand function.

The content of a paragraph = what the author is literally saying. 

The function of a paragraph or line(s) = its relationship to the main idea and the other paragraphs of the passage. 


Common functions include: supporting, contradicting, refuting, shifting focus, emphasizing/highlighting, questioning, theorizing, defending, describing, criticizing, illustrating/ providing an example, and speculating.

Describing the content of a passage involves concrete thinking, while describing its function involves abstract thinking. In asking you to identify the purpose of a piece of information, the SAT is requiring you to go beyond the literal words that appear on the page and translate them into an abstract category.

That is why answers to "purpose" questions cannot be found directly in the passage -- they are testing your ability to make a conceptual leap.

Let's look at an example:

             For centuries, tree lovers mighty and humble have planted and nurtured trees—elms, oaks, ginkgoes, magnolias, apples, and spruces, to name but a handful of America’s 600-some species. “I never before knew the full value of trees,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1793. “Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read, and receive my company. What would I not give that the trees planted nearest the
house at Monticello were full grown.” But trees were often taken for granted in a new nation that seemed to have a limitless supply.
             Then along came Julius Sterling Morton, a nature lover who moved to Nebraska in the 1850s, briefly edited the state’s first newspaper, and soon entered politics. He conceived of an annual day of tree planting, inaugurating a tradition that was rapidly adopted around the country and then the world.  In 1874, when Nebraska proclaimed Arbor Day an official holiday, The Nebraska City News rhapsodized about trees: “The birds will sing to you from their branches, and their thick foliage will protect you from the dust and heat.”

(adapted from "What is a Tree Worth?", Jill Jones, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2011 http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1772)

The purpose of the second paragraph is primarily to:

(A) acknowledge a point 

(B) indicate a shift 

(C) criticize a tradition

(D) dispute an influence 

(E) describe a controversy  

Summary 

Now, if you summarized the second paragraph, you might say that it describes how Julius Sterling Morton moved to Nebraska and created tree day, a holiday that spread around the world. And when you looked at the answers with only that information, you might have gotten confused.

Perhaps you would find your way to the correct answer, but you'd probably do it through process of elimination without really understanding why it was the right answer, thus reinforcing for yourself the very dangerous notion that SAT Critical Reading questions and answers don't really have anything to do with one another.

Function

The primary purpose of the paragraph within the larger context of the passage is not to describe, however. Even though its content does include a description, that is not its main function when we examine it in context of the first paragraph.

To figure out what its function is, we must back up and figure out its relationship to the first paragraph, focusing particularly on the final sentence -- the place where the two paragraphs are closest together and thus where the ideas they contain can compared most directly.

The last sentence of the first paragraph tells us that trees were taken for granted. The first sentence of the second paragraph begins with the words, "Then came along Julius Sterling Morton..." When do people typically use the phrase "Then came along?" When they want to indicate that something new is happening -- or in other words, when something is changing or shifting. The function of the paragraph is to move the narrative in a new direction (trees were once taken for granted, but Morton caused then not to be taken for granted). Which gives us B.


Learning to determine function is not something that happens overnight. For a lot of people, it represents a very new way of thinking and reading, one that feels very unnatural in its initial stages. It's also radically different from the content-based way that most people are taught to read in school, but it's no less important. Until you understand how an argument is put together, what its component pieces are and how they relate to one another, it's very difficult to deconstruct it and/or engage with it in any meaningful   way. Nor should learning to do so be dismissed simply because it's something that's tested on the SAT.

If this is what people mean when they say dismissively that the only thing the SAT tests is the ability to take the SAT, I'd argue that the ability to take the SAT is actually pretty important.

Practice Writing About Your SAT Essay Examples

More than any other part of the SAT, the essay seems to provoke the highest level of time-related panic. Twenty-five minutes might be fine if you're just identifying answers that someone else has written, but actually produce a coherent piece of writing in the same amount of time?

If you're used to writing essays at home, where you have a lot of time to think things through, that kind of constraint can initially be overwhelming.

So I'm going to make a suggestion: treat the essay like you would any other part of the exam. In the initial stages, forget about timing yourself, break the process down, work through its component parts, and then, when you're more comfortable with everything, put the time component back in.

The more time you've spent thinking through and writing about your examples beforehand, the easier the essay will be to write spontaneously. 

The first thing you need to do is find a handful (three or four) examples that work for a wide range of topics and that you know well enough to discuss in a reasonable amount of detail (about seven sentences).

Look, at the major themes on SAT Ninja's essay prompts page, then see if you can figure out some examples that work for a number of them. Think about the books you've read recently, figures or time periods you've studied in history class, and/or topics you've read about in the newspaper or in magazines. Try to pick examples that you actually know something about and are genuinely interested  in. If you're writing about something you really like, your enthusiasm will naturally come across in your essay. Most of my students who have scored in the 10-12 range wrote about things they were seriously passionate about (books, political causes) and could easily write about in a lot of detail.

Next you need get comfortable writing about your examples. Give yourself some time to just free-write write about them. Why are they interesting? What sorts of problems or concerns do they involve? If you're writing about a book or a historical period, are there any lessons to be drawn from it? Do you agree or disagree with the points that an author makes? Just get accustomed to putting your thoughts into words. Just write your ideas at first; don't worry about being organized. Then, once you have an idea of what you want to say, try structuring your thoughts a bit more.

Finally, once you feel like you're comfortable with that, add the time component back in. If you've written all of your ideas out in some format before, it should be easier to integrate them on the fly. (Do make sure to use clear transitions between your examples and to really spelling out each step of your thought process for the reader.) Your thoughts should come more easily, and the whole process will be a lot less nerve-wracking.

How to NOT run out of College Board material

So after talking about various strategies for coping with a dearth (or a paucity) of College Board materials, I'm going to make some suggestions for how you can avoid running out in the first place. 

First, take a good, hard look at your scores on the tests you've taken so far. 

If your score is consistently increasing on each test you take (not just 30 points up, then 20 points down), you don't need to worry so much. By the time you get through all ten tests in the College Board book, you'll probably be more or less where you want to be (and if you're not, see here and here for some ideas on how to proceed). 

If, on the other hand, you've taken a bunch of tests and your scores have been in the same general range on all of them, that's a sign that you're not spending enough time on the areas you really need to work on. You don't need to repeatedly take full practice tests "just to get comfortable;" familiarity does not equal mastery.

Forget about the test for a few day or a week (or two or three), and just focus on building the underlying skills. It might be painful -- and it certainly feels less gratifying than going through lots of practice material -- but  need to go and get solid on the fundamentals before you go back to the test. You can't apply knowledge that you don't have, and you won't get that knowledge just by taking tests. 

Here's what you need to do: go back through the tests you have taken and make a list of the questions you missed. Try to distinguish the ones that were careless errors from the ones you really didn't know how to do (be honest). See if there are any patterns, and see if there are any particular kinds of questions you're consistently missing. When you go back through them, don't just figure out why the right answer is the right answer, but rather try to identify the concept the question is testing.

So for, example, if you missed a subject-verb agreement question on the Writing section because you were thrown off by a prepositional phrase between the subject and the verb, don't just worry about that particular subject and that particular verb. Make sure you know what prepositions are and prepositional phrases are, where they start and where they end, and practice recognizing them. Go get a grammar book -- it doesn't even have to be mine! -- and do a bunch of exercises until you can pick them out automatically. Take a book that has nothing whatsoever to do with the SAT and underline every prepositional phrase that you see. Since subject-verb agreement errors involving prepositional phrases are virtually guaranteed to appear, you stand a much better chance of raising your score if you know unconditionally what a prepositional phrase looks like. And by "unconditionally" I mean that you can recognize one in question 12 of Section 10 after 4.5 hours of test-taking, without even having to think.

If you can identify all the major concepts you're weak on, focus on improving them one at a time , and not take a new full test until you truly feel as though you've mastered something new, you'll be astonished at how long your Blue Book lasts. 

Another suggestion for additional SAT prep materials

When searching for other sources of prep material, people who have exhausted all of the College Board's offerings and who are looking for reliable practice tests tend to overlook one fact: 

While there's only one high-school level reasoning test overseen by the College Board, ETS, the company responsible for the actual development of the SAT, produces a number of tests, including the GRE (Masters and Ph.D. programs), the LSAT (law), and the GMAT (business). Even though they're intended for graduate-school applicants, they're not all that different from the SAT. 

No, they're not identical, and yes, they are harder, sometimes considerably so. But at least on the Verbal side of things, ETS always tests fundamentally the same thing: your ability to determine words from context; to separate out main ideas and supporting detail; and to make inferences based on specific textual elements.

There's a substantial gray area in which the medium-hard SAT passages and the easy-medium GRE and GMAT passages overlap, and an even more substantial area in which SAT and GMAT Fixing Sentences questions overlap. The GMAT sentences are longer, and they tend to test more rules at once, but the exact same rules apply as apply on the SAT.

Trust me when I say this: I've tutored Verbal for the SAT, the GRE, and the GMAT, and I use the same essential reading and writing techniques across the board. They work equally well for every test.

I would recommend the GRE for Reading because its passages are closer to those on the SAT, and the GMAT for Writing (no grammar on the GRE).

Note: I would only suggest trying a more advanced test if you're seriously going for an 800 on Critical Reading and Writing, are already scoring in the 700s (preferably the mid-700s) and have completely exhausted your other options. If you're not already very comfortable with college-level reading, this will  be a massive exercise in frustration.  If you are comfortable with reading academic language and are looking to improve your SAT score even further, however, using this kind of material has two major advantages: 

1) You get an instant source of hard practice material 

2) You don't have to worry about the validity of the questions

Unlike the questions produced by Princeton Review and Barron's and the like, ETS-produced test questions never have arbitrary answers and force you to employ the exact same process of logic that the SAT forces you to use. There's always a good reason why the answer is the answer.

Besides, if you can handle tests written for people who already have a college education, the SAT will be an absolute breeze. 

Don't Retake Your Old Tests

It's really not an effective strategy. Even if you don't think you'll remember the passages or the answers, there's a decent chance that at some subconscious level you actually will.

You'll get an inflated sense of how well you're doing and may be in for a very rude shock when you get your real scores. (This happened to one of my students, who, unbeknownst to me, had been basing her most recent scores on retakes, and who got a major wake-up call when she got her scores back.)

I know the College Board only releases a limited number of SATs, and that there's really no substitute for them, but before you go over to the dark side and start using Princeton Review, I'd like to suggest a partial solution:

If you've already gone through everything the College Board has released (the Official Guide and the tests from the online College Board course) and still need more material, you might want to consider buying one of the old (pre-revised 2005 test) Official Guides. No, there is no Writing section, and yes, you'll have to ignore the analogies, but you'll at least have access to College Board-produced Critical Reading passages (not to mention CB Math).

You can find the books here.

If you want to see whether you really understand the SAT...

try explaining it to someone else. Friend, sibling, parent...anyone. It doesn't even matter whether or not that person is actually going to take the test. The only thing that counts is that they're willing to humor you and sit with a Blue Book for an hour or two.

There's a reason I always ask my students to explain to me why they're doing what they're doing: in about two seconds, it usually becomes exceedingly obvious whether or not they really get it. If someone says that they know but can't really explain it, chances are they actually don't. (For a great explanation of this phenomenon, see this article by Daniel Willingham). It's one thing to shrug and say, "Yeah, that makes sense" when someone explains the answer to you; it's something very different to work out all of the steps necessary on your own and explain them to someone else.

If you're already scoring very well (high 600s+), I would argue that this is actually one of the most productive ways to study. Having to explain something to another person forces you to clarify your own thought process. Things you formerly took for granted suddenly seem bizarrely murky, and you start to wonder just how you know to do x instead of y. You have no choice but to break the process into smaller, more precise steps in order to explain why the answer must be B rather than E.

The result is that you learn exactly what you do and don't know. Furthermore, you gain an awareness of your own thought processes -- an awareness that leads to a much stronger sense of confidence and control when you actually take the test.

SAT Passage Content and "Deep Structure"

Thank you Debbie Stier for posting this article by Daniel Willingham on her blog.

In case you don't want to read the whole thing, Willingham essentially discusses the limits of various attempts to teach "critical thinking" as compared to the somewhat more teachable concept of "deep structure" -- specific underlying elements that seemingly unrelated scenarios actually have in common.

Reading the article got me thinking about teaching SAT Critical Reading and about why attempts to view it as a measure of some sort of generalized "critical thinking" ability miss the mark. I guess this is part of my answer to Debbie's question about what the SAT is really testing.

Let me quote Willingham: 

When one is very familiar with a problem’s deep-struc- 

ture, knowledge about how to solve it transfers well. That 

familiarity can come from long-term, repeated experience 

with one problem, or with various manifestations of one 

type of problem (i.e., many problems that have different 

surface structures, but the same deep structure). After 

repeated exposure to either or both, the subject simply per- 

ceives the deep structure as part of the problem descrip- 

tion.

This quote certainly applies to the Math section, where the word-problem format makes it difficult for may people studying for the SAT to initially recognize which problems are testing the same concepts. In fact, Willingham specifically cites a study in which students had trouble recognizing that two mathematical word-problems that used very different scenarios were testing the same set of skills.  

I think, however, that something like this is also going on with SAT Critical Reading passages: even though they concern wildly different topics and comprise a wide variety of writing styles, they're all fundamentally testing the same thing: rhetoric and structure.

I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that passage content is totally irrelevant -- without some level of knowledge about a subject, it can be difficult to literally make sense out of a reading within the few minutes allotted.

For example, in a Passage 1/Passage 2 sequence that revolves around the debate over global warming, it is of course helpful to know that such a debate exists, that certain positions are held by people in various camps, that certain pieces of evidence are typically trotted out by people in those camps, etc.

Without that context, it's very easy to get lost in the arguments, and if you can't follow the arguments, it's almost impossible to consider the passages critically, either on their own or in relation to one another.

That, however, leads to a paradox:

Once you understand what the author of a passage is literally saying, the passage's content immediately becomes irrelevant.

That is because the SAT is not really testing how much knowledge about a given subject you can absorb from reading 85 lines -- it's testing how an author who just happens to be writing about a particular subject (and could just as easily be writing about any other subject) constructs his or her argument about that subject, as well as the function of particular details at key moments in that argument.

Or put another way: rhetoric is rhetoric is rhetoric is rhetoric. A counter-argument is a counter-argument, whether you're dealing with a passage about the African-American experience or one about Thucydides.

On the SAT, Rhetoric = Deep Structure

Developing SAT Critical Reading skills is not about memorization or about mastering some hazy concept of "Critical Thinking," and at any rate, that's not what the SAT tests. Instead, it is about learning how arguments are structured, how words are chosen to create particular impressions, and how main ideas differ from supporting detail. These are concrete skills that can absolutely be learned. You might not get an 800, but you can certainly improve your ability to recognize these element in any piece of writing.

This brings me back to Willingham's point about "deep structure:"

If you practice approaching any sort of reading by looking out for elements such as context, main idea, supporting arguments, counter-arguments, and words/phrasings used for emphasis, then you will eventually find it much easier to transfer those "deep structure" skills to the SAT. It doesn't mean you'll be better at reasoning in other fields, but you will be more adept at the particular form of rhetorical reasoning that SAT Critical Reading tests.

When to Worry About the SAT Essay

So after yesterday's post about how you should  worry about SAT grammar before you worry about the essay, I'm going to switch gears and make some suggestions about when you should lay off the grammar and start thinking seriously about getting your essay score up.

Let me stress that working on the grammar before the essay is a long-term strategy; essay scores do not usually jump up overnight. Ideally, you still want to give yourself at least a couple of months to work out examples and structures and timing.

That said, I usually recommend that people start worrying seriously about the essay when your multiple choice score has plateaued and and a high(er) essay score has the potential to push your score across a major threshold.

For example, if you're consistently scoring about a 33 raw score (36/49 correct) and are at an 8 essay, pulling your essay up two points to a 10 will move you from a 560 to a 600, and pulling your essay up four points to a 12 will get you a 630.

Likewise, if you're consistently at a raw score of 43 (44/49 correct), going from an 8 to a 10 will pull you from a 660 to a 700, and a 12 will get you to a 730.

Since colleges tend to look at scores in bands of 50 (e.g. 600-650; 700-750), those are jumps that can make a very big difference.