SAT Conventions — mixed set of fifteen academic texts

On the digital SAT, Standard English Conventions questions come as short academic texts, usually one or two sentences about a researcher, an artist or a historical event, with a single blank and four choices. The texts are dense and the names unfamiliar, and the skill is to ignore the content long enough to see the grammar. This material gives a longer run of fifteen such items in one sitting, so you can practice switching quickly between the two skills the domain tests.

Every question is an original text about a real subject: the rhinoceros bone bed at Agate Fossil Beds, the Hopi potter Nampeyo, Katherine Johnson's orbital calculations, Vera Rubin's galaxies, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Twins Study, the Smithsonian's first building, the axolotl, the Salk vaccine trial, the Mississippi River, George Washington Carver and more. Six items test Boundaries: closing a dash pair, a colon after a complete clause, a semicolon between two clauses, an opening comma for a nonrestrictive clause, a comma before an interrupting however, and a complete sentence in place of a fragment. Nine test Form, Structure, and Sense: subject-verb agreement with a long subject, with an inverted sentence and with "the number of," pronoun-antecedent agreement for a person and for an institution, a plural possessive, who versus whom, the past perfect for the earlier of two past events, and a dangling modifier fixed by putting the right noun after the comma. Where options would differ only by a mark, they name the mark in words. Each question has one defensible answer, and the explanations name the trap in each wrong option.

The flashcards collect the rules behind the fifteen questions and end with a short routine for any Conventions question: find the subject and main verb, check the clause boundaries, then check the form of the word at the blank.

The material offers two formats: a multiple-choice quiz with an explanation for every question, and a deck of flashcards. It is practice material written by Zestly and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board, which owns the SAT.

• Work through a longer mixed run of one-blank Conventions items in academic contexts
• Apply Boundaries rules: matching pairs of commas and dashes, colons, semicolons and fragments
• Apply Form, Structure, and Sense rules: agreement, pronouns, possessives, who and whom, tense and modifier placement
• Use a fixed routine to find the tested rule quickly

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the Standard English Conventions content domain of the digital SAT Reading and Writing section as described by the College Board on satsuite.collegeboard.org (Boundaries; Form, Structure, and Sense). Every sentence, option and explanation is original; nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication or practice test.