PSAT Writing — notes, a stated goal, and the one sentence that meets it

Rhetorical synthesis is the question type students find strangest at first sight and lose the fewest marks on once they see what it is doing. You are given a student's research notes — four or five bare facts, one to a line — and a goal stated in a single sentence: to contrast two results, to present a finding and the objection to it, to explain what a program has changed so far. Four sentences follow, and the task is to pick the one that meets that goal using those notes.

What makes it hard is that the wrong answers are not wrong. They are accurate, they are well written, and they are usually doing something a writer might reasonably want to do. This material is twelve of them, and every question carries the same three traps, named in the explanation each time.

The first is the option that accomplishes a different goal. Asked to emphasize what some sculptures are made of, it introduces the exhibit through its curator and its reviews — a perfectly good sentence, and not the one that was asked for. Reading the goal before the options is the whole defense, and it is the habit this material is built to train.

The second adds a fact that appears in no note: that a concrete mix was sold for northern roads, that a bike-share program has done better than the schemes of neighboring cities, that pottery shards were used for grain and water. Everything in the sentence must be traceable to a line in the notes, and one option in every question is not.

The third gives only half of what the goal requires. A contrast needs both of its halves: "Mix B was still uncracked after forty cycles" is true, relevant and useless on its own, because forty means nothing until twelve is set beside it. Options of this kind read as complete sentences and leave the comparison unmade.

The subjects run across science, civic life, the arts and archaeology — arctic terns tracked by satellite, a wetland restoration, a glass atrium, a jazz festival's ticket sales, a research station watching glaciers recede above the communities that drink their meltwater. All of them, and every researcher and institution in them, were invented for this exercise, and nothing is reproduced from any published test.

• Read the stated goal before the options, and treat it as the whole of the question
• Reject an option that is accurate and well written because it accomplishes a different goal
• Trace every clause of a candidate sentence back to a line in the notes, and spot the one fact that is not there
• Insist on both halves of a contrast or a comparison, and see when only one has been given
• Use at least two notes in the chosen sentence, as the type requires
• Tell a measured change from a hoped-for one when a goal asks what has happened so far
• Decide between two relevant options by asking which does exactly what the goal names

Every set of notes here was written for this exercise, four or five bare facts to a question, with no two questions sharing a subject. Among them: a satellite study reporting that Arctic terns travel over forty thousand miles a year, and critics who think the transmitters change the birds' flight speed; a gallery showing twenty minimalist pieces made of recycled industrial steel; a bike-sharing program of five hundred bicycles after which local congestion fell fifteen percent; two concrete mixes through one winter, one cracking after twelve freeze-and-thaw cycles and the other uncracked after forty; three thousand native shrubs planted by volunteers in a wetland restoration; and a research station whose glaciers are receding above communities that rely on the meltwater. Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the PSAT/NMSQT, and it is not an exam centre.