Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Standard English Conventions: Conventions 1 — boundaries, agreement and modifiers.
← SAT
Sentence boundaries, punctuation, and the form and structure of a sentence — ≈26% of the Reading and Writing section, 11 to 15 questions, and the most learnable part of the whole test.
Everything else on the SAT rewards reasoning. This rewards knowing rules. There are perhaps fifteen of them that matter, they do not change, and a student who learns them properly can get essentially all of these questions right — which is worth more than a hundred points and is reachable in a few weeks.
It is also the domain where being right by ear is most dangerous. Plenty of punctuation that sounds fine is wrong, and plenty that is correct sounds stilted read aloud. If you cannot say why a choice is right, you are guessing on a question that did not require guessing.
Boundaries — where one sentence ends and the next begins, and what goes at the join. This is the comma splice, the run-on, the sentence fragment, and the four ways of joining two independent clauses: a full stop, a semicolon, a comma with a coordinating conjunction, or a colon when the second clause explains the first. The most common SAT question in the entire section is four choices that differ only in the punctuation at one point, and the test is whether what sits on each side of that point is a complete sentence.
Form, structure and sense — subject–verb agreement across a long interrupting phrase; pronoun–antecedent agreement and ambiguity; verb tense and mood where the sentence establishes a time frame; the possessive apostrophe, including its against it's and the plural possessive; modifier placement, where the phrase at the front of a sentence must describe the noun that follows it; and parallel structure in a list.
Cover the choices and read the sentence without the punctuation. Ask one question: is what comes before this point a complete sentence, and is what comes after it a complete sentence? Two complete sentences cannot be joined by a comma alone. One complete and one incomplete cannot be joined by a semicolon. That one test decides a large fraction of these questions before you have looked at a single option.
The second habit is almost as useful: when choices differ only in a comma or apostrophe, name the rule. If no rule applies, the answer is usually the choice with the least punctuation — the SAT does not reward decoration.
The real test sets a boundaries question as four options differing only in a mark of punctuation. These materials cannot. The automatic checks that guard every question bank here casefold the options and strip punctuation before comparing them, so four choices differing only in a comma read as the same answer four times over and the material is refused.
So the boundary and punctuation questions here are set the other way round: you are shown a sentence with the fault in it, and asked which change makes it conform — with the options written out in words. Add the word "but" after the comma. Replace the comma with a full stop. Place a comma before "which". The judgement is identical, and arguably harder, since you have to name the repair rather than recognise a shape; the layout is ours, and the real paper will look different.
The same limit rules out setting its against it's as two options in one question. That distinction lives on a flashcard, and the possessive questions use the spelled-out it is as the distractor instead — which has the advantage of handing you the test worth using on every one of them: read the sentence with "it is" in the blank, and if it collapses, the word you want is the possessive.
One card per rule, with the counter-example that makes it stick: not "use a semicolon between independent clauses" but the pair of sentences that show why the comma version is wrong. Rules you can recite are the entire content of this domain.
