The SAT Proofreading and Editing Section: Basic Principles
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You're Going on a Grammatical Scavenger HuntFortunately, once you know what you're looking for, you won't have to rely on your ear to pick out the writing problems lurking in the multiple-choice questions. It's useful to think of the proofreading and editing questions as a scavenger hunt.
You might be surprised to learn that the test covers quite a narrow range of grammatical and other writing problems. I'm going to arm you with a specific list so that you will know precisely which errors you need to find and how many of each. (Unlike too many hapless students, you will not be wandering through the SAT Writing Test vaguely looking for errors.) After all, it would be hard to go on a scavenger hunt without a list of what you're looking for, right?
A Checklist for Your SAT Scavenger Hunt
Here are the fourteen grammatical concepts you need to know. You don't need to memorize these categories (which we'll use for discussion purposes only), and you won't need to classify errors on the test, either. The only thing you'll need to do on the SAT is recognize a writing problem when you see it. That said, if you're struggling with a potential error that you can't fit into one of these categoriesif the wording merely "sounds wrong"it probably isn't an error at all.
I've listed the categories in order of their overall importance, combining how frequently the category appears on the SAT with the category's average difficulty. Just skim this chart for now; you can always refer back to it later.
| Category | Frequency | Difficulty |
| Pronoun Errors | Very High | Medium |
| Singular-Plural Errors | Very High | Medium |
| Idiom Errors | High | High |
| Comparison Errors | Medium | Very High |
| Parallel Structure Errors | High | Medium |
| Wordiness and Redundancy** | High | Medium |
| Modifier Errors* | Medium | High |
| Ambiguity** | Medium | High |
| Diction Errors | Low | Very High |
| Adjective-Adverb Errors | Medium | Medium |
| Verb Tense Errors | Medium | Low |
| Sentence Fragments or Run-ons* | Medium | Low |
| Transition or Punctuation Errors* | Medium | Low |
| Logic Errors** | Very Low | Very High |
The difficulty of each category reflects how easy it is to overlook this type of error on the SAT, not how hard the concept is to learn; the frequency refers to how often the category shows up on an SAT. The two most frequent errorssingular-plural errors and pronoun errorsappear on average three or four times each; diction errors, a low frequency category, will appear once, at most twice; logic errors, perhaps not at all.
The asterisked (*) categories appear only on sentence correction questions, all other categories appear on these as well as sentence correction questions. The double-asterisked (**) categories are usually tested indirectly, among the choices rather than in the original sentence.
For most students, reviewing the top five categories will result in the largest and most rapid score gains:
- Pronoun errors
- Singular-plural errors
- Idiom errors
- Comparison errors
- Parallel structure errors