The SAT Proofreading and Editing Section: Basic Principles

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Wrong.

Just reading through a sentence isn't enough. If you want to spot all the errors—and get a high score—you will have to chop through each sentence suspiciously, word by word and phrase by phrase.

You must read a bit (for example, until you get to a verb), then see what it refers to (which subject and possibly which object), and once you've verified that the two are in agreement, you can move on to the next part of the sentence, and so on. And as you've seen, the two parts that need to be in agreement can be far apart.

The problem, as we've discussed, is the presence of all these usually irrelevant words and phrases that distract and confuse us. On the first readthrough of a sentence—and you may need to read a sentence two or three times before you spot an error—read "around" the phrases and clauses that merely pad the sentence, camouflaging the error. If you haven't spotted an error yet, then you can go back and examine those phrases one by one to see whether there's anything wrong.

It's easy, focusing on individual phrases in this way as we must, to lose sight of the big picture, so if you still haven't spotted an error, read quickly through the sentence a third time, as a whole. If you haven't spotted an error at that point—one-sixth of the questions contain no error, remember—move on. Rather than beat your head against the question, mark the sentence as no error and circle the question number. If you have time remaining at the end of the section, return to the questions you weren't sure about and read them with fresh eyes.

The Bracket Technique
A powerful technique that allows us to read around potentially distracting phrases is to enclose them in parentheses. As you read through a sentence for the first time, place parentheses around either of the following:

• any prepositional phrases (by far the most common prepositions are of and in, followed by to, for, by, and with)
• any clauses set off by commas

The degree (of error in calculations done by ancient Mayan astronomers long before the invention of telescopes) were, (even by modern standards), incredibly small. Notice that if we read around the parentheses, ignoring the words within them, we're back to our original basic sentence in which the agreement error was obvious. If we didn't find an error outside the parentheses, our next step would be to examine the words within the parentheses.

Using your pencil to break up each sentence into manageable bits also helps you stay focused. Remember Einstein's words of advice that we discussed in The SAT: How to Gain (or Lose) 30 IQ Points—Instantly!, Your pencil is smarter than you are. As an exercise, why don't you practice applying parentheses to the ten sentences you completed on page two of this section.

Learn to Read Literally
In school it's important to figure out what your teachers mean, rather than listening to what they literally say. On the SAT Writing Test, though, the opposite is true: you need to pay attention to what each sentence literally says, rather than to what you think it means or to what the sentence was trying to say.

In The SAT: How Your Brain Can Get You in Trouble, we discussed the trouble that your brain's natural intelligence can get you into on every section of the SAT. Your brain is programmed to make sense of the information it receives, so it fills in the blanks when something doesn't make sense.

Here's the problem: many grammatical errors result in nonsense, literally. When your brain encounters something that doesn't make sense, it instantaneously tries to figure out what's going on. In the real world that's what your brain is supposed to do. On the proofreading and editing questions, however, what your brain "hears" and what a nonsensical sentence actually says can be radically different.