by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 25, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog
The ACT English section tests both reading and writing skills simultaneously, and it is necessary to change your approach based on the type of question you are being asked. While grammar questions require you to recall specific rules, rhetoric questions require you to apply specific concepts about how paragraphs and essays work: what makes an effective transition (what is the logical relationship between two ideas?); how a paragraph is most logically developed; and what constitutes relevant vs. irrelevant information.
Unlike grammar questions, rhetoric questions can be absolutely, perfectly grammatically correct yet still be wrong. You can’t be fooled by how they sound — you actually have to think (yes, think!) about whether they go along with the main idea of the passage or paragraph in question.
In short, they’re reading questions, not writing questions. And because this is the case, you have to treat them like reading questions.
That means going back to the passage, figuring out the gist of the section you’re being asked to deal with, and figuring out what sort of information would be relevant.
One of the biggest mistakes I consistently see people make on rhetoric questions is to start by looking at the answers and assuming they’ll remember the content well enough to sort everything out rather than going back to the passage and working out the answer for themselves beforehand.
When most people read the passages as they’re working through the questions, though, they’re usually only really paying attention to grammar rather than content. They’re not thinking about main ideas and supporting information but rather about whether that comma in #27 was really supposed to be there. So when they’re asked to insert/delete information, they don’t really have the full context for it.
Remember: the readings on the English section are pretty simple. It’s usually not too hard to figure out their main idea and thus whether a particular sentence or part of a sentence should be used to support it. Yes, it may take a whole 30 seconds, but that’s time better spent actually figuring out the answer than staring at two options and trying to decide between them. So to sum up:
1) Read the question and identify exactly what you’re being asked to insert or delete.
2) Go back to the passage and read as much as you need to figure out the main idea of the passage or paragraph. For questions that ask about the passage as a whole, check the title: it’s there to tell you what the passage is about. For questions that ask you about the middle of a paragraph, read the topic sentence. Conversely, if you’re asked to insert the first sentence of a paragraph, jump ahead and read the middle of the paragraph.
3) Ask yourself whether the information in question is relevant to that topic and why/why not.
4) Look at the answers. The right one should pretty much pop out at you.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 8, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Present perfect = has written
The present perfect is used to describe an action that began in the past and that is continuing into the present. It is usually used in conjunction with the words for and since, which serve as “tip-offs” that this tense is required.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels since 1977.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels for more than thirty years.
Although these sentences describe actions that began in the past, they both clearly imply that that Leslie Marmon Silko is *still* a best-selling author.
Simple past = wrote
The simple past is used to describe an action that began and ended in the past.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
OR
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko was twenty-nine years old when she published her first novel.
On the SAT, sentences that require the simple past typically include a date or time period that clearly indicates a past action or event (e.g. 1815, The Renaissance, etc.).
Past perfect = had written
This is the tense that people tend to have the hardest time with. It is used only in the following case: when you have two finished actions in the past, the past perfect is used to describe the one that happened first.
In other words, if a sentence does not clearly indicate two separate actions, you should not use the past perfect!
Correct: Before Leslie Marmon Silko published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she had already written a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #1: Leslie Marmon Silko published a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #2: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
The past perfect is therefore used to describe the first action.
Under no circumstances is the following correct:
Incorrect: Before Leslie Marmon Silko had published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she wrote a number of well-regarded short stories.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 6, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
As pretty much anyone with more than five minutes of SAT prep experience knows, Critical Reading passages are not exactly chosen for their phenomenal entertainment value. Ecotourism? Snooze. Whale play? Who cares. Copepods? Even I had to force myself to stay awake for that one. (Incidentally, when I was writing lots of reading material, I used a couple of passages that were so boring I actually had trouble mustering sufficient focus to write questions about them! Having to answer the questions may be bad, but I can assure you that writing them can be far, far more excruciating.)
So yes, while occasionally you’ll stumble across a passage on a topic that holds your interest for more than, say, a second-and-a-half, the majority of the time that just won’t be the case. Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the questions, regardless of how much of the passage you’ve tuned out, and if you spend too much time reading and re-reading, desperately trying to absorb everything that’s going on, you’ll already be behind time-wise when you start the questions. Besides, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend reading if you’re not really absorbing anything.
So what’s the solution? Stop trying to understand everything (at least for the first read-through) and just focus on something else: finding the main idea, the tone, and the stuff that the author indicates is important (explanations, italics, anything with the words “important” or the “the goal,” “the point,” etc.). If you actively look for something as you read, it’s a whole lot harder to tune out as you go through the process.
As I’ve written about before, the content of most Critical Reading passages is in some ways deeply irrelevant — that is, provided that you can grasp the basics, it doesn’t really matter what the author happens to be saying, only how s/he structures the argument. If you start reading for function, content becomes secondary.
So say you’re trying to slog through that awful passage about copepods (or something equally hideous), stop reading carefully as soon as you figure out what the basic idea is, and just start worrying about the role that each new paragraph plays — and that’s information you can get in the first couple of sentences. If you see “for example” or “for instance,” that means that the paragraph is pretty much going to support an idea; if you see “however,” or “despite,” that’s a pretty good indicator that the rest of the paragraph is going to refute an idea. Then you can just skim through the rest of it to make sure nothing new and important gets introduced.
If it helps you to do so, you can also write something like “support” or “refute” or “explain” next to the paragraph, just to keep yourself paying attention and give you an outline of the argument. Furthermore, when you get a question about why the author included a particular piece of information in that paragraph, all you’ll have to do is look at your note: if the point of the paragraph is to support, chances are the right answer will start with a positive word; if the point of the paragraph is to disagree, chances are it’ll start with a negative word. It won’t matter if you haven’t gotten every last detail — you’ll have the bit picture, which you can use to make a reasonable guess, and on the SAT that’s what really counts.
Will this give you the answer to every question? Of course not. I’m simplifying a bit here. But you might be surprised at how often working this way 1) keeps you focused, and 2) gets you close to the right answer, even if you’re not really certain you understood everything you read.
