SAT — Standard English Conventions, mixed set

The three materials before this one take the conventions a family at a time, which is how to learn them. This set interleaves the whole domain, which is how they arrive on the test: ten sentences, ten different things that might be wrong, and nothing to say in advance whether the question is about a verb, a comma, a pronoun or a modifier. Working out what kind of fault is present turns out to be most of the work, and the wrong answers are drawn deliberately from other parts of the domain so that noticing something is wrong is not enough.

Eight sentences are faulty and two are sound. The faults span both halves of the domain — a verb agreeing with the noun nearest it rather than with its subject, two sentences joined by a comma, a past perfect standing beside the words "next month", a pronoun taking the subject form inside an object, a list whose third item repeats words the first two left out, a long opening clause with no comma after it, and a possessive with no apostrophe.

The modifier question is the one worth dwelling on. "Walking through the park at dusk, the trees appeared much taller" attaches its opening phrase to the only noun available, which makes the sentence report trees taking a walk. What makes it a dangling modifier rather than a misplaced one is that the person who was walking is nowhere in the sentence at all, so no amount of moving words around will fix it — the repair is to put the walker in. That distinction is worth having, because the two faults look identical until you ask who is doing the thing the phrase describes.

The two sound sentences test the other half of the skill, which is the willingness to leave a sentence alone. One puts a relative clause in commas after a proper name, where the clause can only be adding information because a name has already done the identifying. The other inverts its subject and verb after "Rarely", which is a legitimate and rather elegant construction that a reader trained to hunt for errors will want to correct.

Every person, firm and institution in these sentences is invented. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released test, practice test, question bank or scoring guideline. The real test prints four versions of each sentence and asks which is correct; that format cannot be used here, since four sentences differing only by a comma are read as one repeated answer by this system's checks, so these questions name the fault and the repair in words instead.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the SAT, and it is not an exam center.

• Work out what kind of convention a sentence is testing before deciding what to change
• Find the true subject of a verb across an intervening phrase
• Recognize a comma splice among other faults that share its look
• Match a verb tense to a time word standing elsewhere in the sentence
• Choose the pronoun case a compound object requires
• Tell a dangling modifier from a misplaced one by asking whether the agent appears at all
• Keep the items of a list in one grammatical form
• Place the comma that a long introductory element requires
• Form a singular possessive with the apostrophe before the s
• Leave a correct sentence alone, including one that inverts its subject and verb

"Walking through the park at dusk, the trees appeared much taller than they had in previous years." Which choice best describes the writer's sentence?