The SAT Proofreading and Editing Section: Basic Principles

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The Simple Principle Behind Many Grammatical Rules
Learning grammar often seems like you have to memorize dozens of bewildering and arbitrary rules. In fact most grammatical rules are based on logical principles, but the principles are rarely explained to students.

Once you understand the principle behind a rule, the rule is easier to remember and to apply. The most fundamental concept underlying grammatical rules is the principle of agreement. Different parts of a sentence should not disagree with each other.

Verbs have to agree with the nouns they refer to. For example, in the sentence, The temperature were cold outside so dress warmly, the plural verb "were" does not agree with the singular noun "temperature." What's more, the verb "were" is in the past tense, which does not agree with the tense of the verb "dress."

Just as verbs have to agree with their nouns, so do pronouns. Problems between nouns, pronouns, and verbs account for a large number of the errors on the proofreading questions. As a first step on the proofreading questions, make sure that any connected parts are in agreement, especially nouns or pronouns, with each other and with their verbs.

On the proofreading and editing questions, whenever you see a noun or verb or pronoun, whether or not it is underlined—stop! Establish what word or phrase it's related to or referring to, and see whether the two parts are in agreement.

In the rest of the section I'll show you every type of error you need to look for. Not all errors in this section are based on noun-verb-pronoun disagreements, but checking for these in a sentence is an excellent first step.

How the SAT Camouflages Simple Grammatical Errors to Make Them Difficult to Spot
If most SAT grammatical errors come down to basic problems in agreement, you may be wondering how the proofreading and editing questions can get so difficult. Here's how.

Even the most grammatically challenged students notice agreement errors when the related terms are next to each other. The test writers camouflage agreement errors by inserting phrases that separate the related terms and distract you from the underlying disagreement.

Read the next 24-word sentence quickly and see whether the agreement error is obvious (I'm guessing it won't be):

The degree of error in calculations done by ancient Mayan astronomers long before the invention of telescopes were, even by modern standards, incredibly small.

The sentence is a bit cumbersome though not unusually so by SAT standards. Still, the basic meaning is not too difficult to understand. The agreement error is hard to spot because 15 words separate the subject—degree—from its verb—were.

Let's work backwards to see how a simple error is made difficult. I'll strip the sentence down to its essential words:

The degree were small.

It's not clear what degree the sentence is referring to now, but the disagreement between the subject and the verb pops out. If every proofreading question were four words long like that one, hardly anybody would have trouble spotting most of the errors. The problem is that the average sentence in this section is more than twenty words long, so it's easy to get lost and entangled in all the phrases.

Now let's see what happens when the test writers start adding words to the sentence, and watch how the error becomes hidden. They start by adding an adverb:

The degree were incredibly small.

The sentence is a bit longer, but the new word did not separate the verb from its subject, so the disagreement between them is still obvious. Okay, the test writers decide to add a prepositional phrase now:

The degree of error were incredibly small.

The verb is separated from the subject now, but since the noun "error" now next to the verb is also singular, the verb "were" still seems to disagree with something. Since most students would still immediately spot the problem verb, the test writers get really tricky now by adding a phrase with a plural noun next to the verb:

The degree of error in calculations done by ancient Mayan astronomers were incredibly small.

All of a sudden the disagreement has become much harder to spot because the plural verb "were" now seems to be referring to the plural noun "astronomers." And just for good measure, to make you work to find the error, the test writers add another bunch of words to throw students completely off track:

The degree of error in calculations done by ancient Mayan astronomers long before the invention of telescopes were, even by modern standards, incredibly small.

And there you have it: a simple grammatical error camouflaged almost beyond recognition.

Remember that widely separated parts of a sentence may be grammatically connected, so you can't simply read the questions word by word. You'll sometimes need to read a bit, jump to another part of the sentence, then jump back to continue reading through.