Conventions 1 — boundaries, agreement and modifiers

Fourteen questions on the part of the SAT that is pure rules — and therefore the part where a few weeks of work reliably turns into points.

Five on sentence boundaries, which is where most of the marks in this domain sit. A comma splice, a fused sentence, a fragment thirty words long, a dependent clause attached to the wrong main clause, and a "which" clause that needs a comma rather than a full stop. The fact underneath all five is the same one, and it is worth more than anything else in the Reading and Writing section: two complete sentences can be joined in exactly four ways — a full stop, a semicolon, a comma with a coordinating conjunction, or a colon when the second explains the first. A comma alone is not one of them.

One question here is decided before you look at the grammar at all: the word after the punctuation is capitalised, which means a sentence has to end there and only a full stop can do it. That observation is worth training.

Nine on form, structure and sense. Subject-verb agreement across a long interrupting clause and across "along with" — which adds information without making anything plural. "The number of" against "a number of". Pronoun-antecedent agreement. The possessive its. A tense fixed by a stated date. A dangling modifier, where the opening phrase describes a beam that cannot possibly have done the thing described. Parallel form in a list.

How these differ from the real test, and why. On the real SAT, a boundaries question shows you four options that differ only in a mark of punctuation. The automatic checks that guard these banks casefold and strip punctuation before comparing options, so four choices differing only in a comma read to them as the same answer four times over, and the material is refused. The five boundary questions here therefore ask which change makes the sentence conform, with the options written out in words. The judgement is identical — you still have to decide whether each side of the join is a complete sentence — but 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 is on a flashcard instead, and the its question here uses the spelled-out "it is" as its distractor, which gives you the substitution 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.

Every explanation names the rule before it names the error, because on this domain that is the difference that matters. Being right by ear and being right by rule look identical until the sentence is a long one — and the sentences on the second module of a strong test are long ones.

The twelve flashcards are the rules themselves, which is genuinely all the content this domain has.

• Name the four legal ways to join two independent clauses, and recognise that a comma alone is not one of them
• Spot a comma splice, a fused sentence and a fragment on sight, however long the sentence is
• Attach a dependent clause to the main clause it actually belongs to
• Punctuate a non-restrictive "which" clause correctly and know why a full stop would leave a fragment
• Find the true subject of a sentence by crossing out the interrupting phrase
• Know that "along with" and "as well as" never make a singular subject plural, and that only "and" does
• Apply the rule for "the number of" against "a number of"
• Use the "it is" substitution test to choose between the possessive and the contraction
• Detect a dangling modifier by reading the opening phrase against the first noun after the comma
• Match the grammatical form of items already in a list

"The Voynich manuscript has resisted every attempt at decipherment for more than a century, Cryptanalysts who broke wartime ciphers have worked on it without result." Which change makes the sentence conform to the conventions of Standard English? — The word after the comma is capitalised, which rules out every join that keeps one sentence running: a semicolon, a colon and a comma all continue a sentence, and none is followed by a capital in ordinary prose. The comma has to become a full stop.