Fifth Edition, The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar

Book Preface

This purpose of this book is to prepare you for the full range of grammar and rhetoric (style) concepts covered on the redesigned SAT®. More specifically, it is to teach you to apply those concepts to the specific ways in which they are tested on the exam. Instead of providing explanations and examples for a single version of a rule and leaving you to deduce its subtler or more complex applications, this book walks you through multiple versions of each concept, showing you how it can be tested from various angles and in combination with other concepts.

At the same time, however, this book is intended to teach you to simplify-that is, to quickly identify juSt
what_each question type is testing so that you do not become distracted by irrelevant details, and to reduce seemingly complicated questions down to their essential terms. Concepts guaranteed to be tested on every exam are presented first, while less frequently tested ones are presented later. In addition, concepts that could plausibly be tested but that have not (yet) appeared on a released exam are noted as such in the text.

In order to make your transition to the actual test as smooth as possible, this book is designed to complement the eight exams in Tire Official SAT® Study Guide, 2020 Edition.
If you have a limited amount of time to prepare for the SAT, you should work as follows:

1. Take a diagnostic Writing and Language Test from The Official SAT® Study Guide.
2. Mark the questions you answered incorrectly, along with those whose answers you were unsure of (even if you got them right), and compare them to the list of questions by test on p. 280. Note the category of each error.
3. Read the explanations in the appropriate chapter, and do the corresponding exercises. If you want to look at some authentic examples as well, you can use the list of questions by category on p. 275 to find specific College Board-produced questions that test particular error types.
4. When you feel comfortable with those concepts, take another test and repeat the process. Keep working this way until you are consistently scoring in your target range on timed, full-length exams.