SAT Writing: Parallelism
February 19, 2008 by Adam
Filed under All Posts, Writing, Writing Multiple Choice
About three or four times per SAT, a Writing question will test your ability to spot problems with a sentence’s ‘parallelism’.
Parallelism requires that similar phrases be written in similar (ie., ‘parallel’) grammatical form.
While the SAT tests parallelism in a number of ways, a typical question of this type will include a list in which one of the items is grammatically different from the others.
Whenever you see a LIST, look for problems with parallelism.
For example:
Incorrect:
A talented basketball player, Sarah can jump high, pass crisply, and is an accurate shooter.
Correct:
A talented basketball player, Sarah can jump high, pass crisply, and shoot accurately.
—
From SAT Unlocked, which also includes a complete list of the practice questions in The Official SAT Study Guide that test this SAT Writing rule.
