SAT Writing: Improving Sentences Tips

Each Improving Sentence question provides a sentence and asks to you to change the underlined portion if necessary.
Once in awhile, the underlined portion may include the whole sentence, but usually only a part of the sentence is underlined.

Answer choice (A) is always ‘no error’.
Answer choice (A) simply repeats the underlined portion of the sentence as it appears in the question prompt. If there is no error in the sentence, (A) is the correct answer.

Improving  Sentences Tips:

• Improving Sentence questions appear in order of difficulty.
  The easiest questions appear at the beginning of the section and become progressively harder as the section moves along.

• Read the sentence carefully and try to figure out what the issue is before looking at the answers.
  When you know what improvement to look for, you can often eliminate incorrect answers with just a single word. Rewrite the sentence in your head the way you think it should appear and then look for your rewrite in the answers.

• Start with the shortest answer first and work toward the longest.
  Correct answers tend to be shorter.

• Watch out for extra pronouns (it, they, that, this, etc.) and strange uses of the verb ‘to be’ (being, had been, were being, etc.).
  These are usually sure signs of an INCORRECT answer.

• Trust your gut.
  The best sounding answer is usually the right one. Especially among the easier questions at the beginning of the section, choose the answer that you would most likely use if you were writing the sentence.

• Don’t be afraid to pick (A).
  Statistically, each answer choice appears approximately the same number of times (one out of five), so there will almost always be a number of Sentence Improvement questions where (A) is the correct answer.

From SAT Unlocked.