by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 18, 2015 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog
Note: Because this post has become so popular, I’ve made it available in PDF format. Click here to download.
I’ve recently received a handful of questions asking for clarification about rule governing the use of commas with names and titles. Of all the comma rules tested on the SAT® and ACT®, this is probably the subtlest.
The good news is that questions testing this rule don’t show up very often; the bad news is that if you don’t know the rule, these questions can be very tricky to answer.
The other piece of good news, however, is that when names/titles appear in the middle of a sentence (that is, not as the first or last words), these questions can almost always be correctly answered using a simple shortcut. And if you just want to know the rule for everyday use, the shortcut is effective in the real world as well.
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by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 6, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, The New SAT
This post was inspired by Robin Koerner’s little rant in the Huffington Post about his encounter with a job applicant who had a 3.9 GPA but no idea of how to use an apostrophe correctly.
While you can, in real life, break some of the grammatical rules the SAT and ACT test without anyone really noticing, you cannot break this one. Sure, your high school or even your college teachers may overlook it, but if you screw this up on your resume or even in an email to a potential employer or college interviewer, it may very well be noticed and count very seriously against you. In many cases, it can lead to a flat-out rejection. Employers actually don’t care about your critical-thinking skills unless you can express yourself in basic, coherent English. If you don’t believe me, check out this article from the Washington Post. (more…)
