PSAT Writing — rules, transitions and goals
This is the most learnable part of the whole test, because the rules are finite and they repeat. Six of these ten questions are conventions: a comma splice, a run-on, subject-verb agreement across a long intervening phrase, a dangling modifier, a supplement fenced with mismatched marks, and a pronoun that could refer to either of two bodies. The remaining four are the Expression of Ideas half — two transitions, two rhetorical synthesis.
Each conventions question prints the faulty sentence and asks which described repair is right. That is a deliberate departure from the real paper, which sets these as four versions of one sentence differing only in punctuation, and the reason is technical: the checker behind these materials treats options differing only by punctuation as four copies of the same answer and refuses the item. What survives the change is the part being examined — knowing which rule applies and why the other repairs do not. What is lost is the visual scan of four near-identical lines, and for that specific drill there is no substitute for College Board's own practice.
The distractors are the point. Every wrong repair here is one that a student would plausibly choose and that does something definite and wrong to the sentence: converting a splice into a run-on, leaving a supplement fenced at one end only, fixing a pronoun's number when the problem was which noun it pointed at, supplying the park when what the sentence needed was a walker. Each explanation names the rule rather than appealing to how the sentence sounds, and says what each wrong answer would do if you chose it.
The two synthesis questions are the ones worth slowing down for. Both give a short set of notes and a specific stated goal, and in both the wrong options are true, drawn from the notes, and meet a different goal — explaining what a method is to readers who already know it, or emphasising what two things have in common when the goal was a named difference. The commonest error on this question type is not misreading the notes but skimming the goal.
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- Recognise a comma splice and a run-on, and say what makes each half of a sentence independent
- Find the true subject across an intervening phrase and make the verb agree with it
- Explain what an opening participial phrase attaches to, and repair a sentence where it attaches to the wrong thing
- Fence a supplement correctly, and recognise that the mark that opens it must also close it
- Repair an ambiguous pronoun by naming the noun, and see why changing its number does not help
- Choose the transition the logic requires, and name the relationship each wrong transition would signal
- Meet a stated rhetorical goal from a set of notes, and reject sentences that are true but meet a different goal
A student writes: 'Dr Aris, the lead researcher on the project — decided to publish the findings immediately.' What is wrong with the punctuation, and how should it be repaired?
Sample question
This sentence contains a comma splice: 'The chemistry experiment finished at four o'clock, the students tidied the benches before they left.' Which described change repairs it?
- Replace the comma with a semicolon, since each half is a complete sentence on its own.
- Add a second comma after 'students', so that the subject of the second half is enclosed by a pair of commas.
- Delete the comma, so that the two halves run straight on into each other.
- Replace the comma with a colon, since the second half explains what is meant by the first.
See the answer
Replace the comma with a semicolon, since each half is a complete sentence on its own.
A clause is independent when it has its own subject and finite verb and could stand alone as a sentence. Both halves here qualify — 'The chemistry experiment finished at four o'clock' and 'the students tidied the benches before they left' — and a comma is not strong enough to join two of those, which is what makes this a splice. A semicolon is. Deleting the comma does not fix the splice, it converts it into a run-on, which is the same fault with less punctuation. The pair of commas is a confusion with the rule for supplements: a subject is not a supplement and is never enclosed. The colon is the closest call and still wrong — a colon works when the second part delivers what the first promises, an explanation, a list, a definition; tidying the benches is the next thing that happened, not an account of what finishing at four o'clock means.
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