<p>I am taking the SATs for the second time in October. I am happy with my CR and I don’t need any help with math but I want my writing score to go from a 630 to at least a 700 to match my other grades. Does anyone have any advice specific to this portion of the test? Thanks</p>
<p>Here is my advice. If you don’t feel like doing, reading, or thinking about grammar and writing right now, skip #2 and #3. I do a bit of explaining there (because I like to).</p>
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<li><p>Look through this thread (66 pages): <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/782128-post-writing-questions-here.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/782128-post-writing-questions-here.html</a>. It’s helpful.</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t think ‘memorization.’ Most writing questions on the SAT have some degree of reasoning and logic behind them, and they usually have some grammatical form that you are already familiar with and don’t exactly need to “memorize.” Learning grammar is a natural process. It shouldn’t be a painstaking one. If you succeed in trying to understand the grammar behind a term, you will remember it better than if you just blindly memorized the term.</p></li>
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<p>Take this sentence for instance:
The correct choice is “while.” “while” should be something like “with.” If you look for something to memorize, you won’t find it. So you have to break everything down and try to just be familiar with why the word “while” is incorrect. Here’s how I break it down in explanation: Saying Opinions about him have always been split, with some liking him while others hating him instead of …with some liking him and others hating him is like saying There were some people eating while some people drinking instead of There were some people eating and some people drinking. This is because the word “while” is supposed to be followed by a sentence. You should find nothing wrong with a sentence like Some people ate while some people drank because what follows “while” (“some people drank”) is an actual sentence. On the other hand, you should find something wrong with a sentence like There were some people eating while some people drinking, because “some people drinking” is not a sentence; it is a noun phrase that refers to a group of people drinking.</p>
<p>And unless you can get to an advanced stage of understanding grammar, don’t try so much to learn grammatical terms such as ‘participle’ and ‘gerund.’ They probably will just complicate things.</p>
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<li>And here is a basic grammar lesson that I just felt like leaving you with:
When you say something like I ate a cookie last night, you are merely talking about a past event. This is called the simple past tense. This is a simple way of talking. How do you commemorate Michael Jackson? You might say something like He has done many inspirational things in music and pop culture. The “has done” uses the present perfect tense. This isn’t just simply talking about an action that occurred at a single point in time. It refers to an abstract period of time in the past which is acknowledged in the present. Another use of the present perfect tense is to describe an action such that you acknowledge that it started occurring in the past and is still occurring: I have been doing my homework since 4 P.M. Now if you finished your homework at 10 P.M., then you aren’t doing it in the present anymore. At this point, if you want to make the same point, whatever that may be, you would switch from the present perfect to the past perfect: I had been doing my homework like a good student.</li>
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<p>Since the present perfect and past perfect tenses are more abstract than the simple present and simple past tenses, when you use words that refer to or signify a single point in time, you normally wouldn’t use the present perfect or past perfect. For example, you wouldn’t normally say He had gained a lot of weight in 2008. You’d simply say He gained a lot of weight in 2008. In other words, don’t use the present perfect or past perfect when it isn’t necessary. </p>