5 tips to improve your SAT English score

if you're struggling on the SAT English section like so many other students let's talk about five tips that can help you boost that score tip one is to do your easiest questions first now this is going to depend on you some questions will be easier for some students than others but as a rule of thumb go ahead and start with these words and context questions they tend to go quickly if you know them these will usually be the first four or five questions so if I jump to question four here we've still got words in

context once I get to five boom We moved on to main purpose I would move past these main purpose questions honestly what I consider the reading type questions I would skip past move on ahead to around 14 or 15 where we get to conventions of Standard English for this one it's going to be 15 and then here you'll have another stretch of questions that go more quickly so if I go all the way to 20 we're still there if I go to 22 okay it looks like rhetorical synthesis so that would be my suggestion start

with in context skip ahead to standards of conventional English and bust through those and then after that once you've racked up those points go back start working on those questions that are going to take a little bit longer tip number two is to eliminate or cross out wrong answers you can do this with the crossout tool on Blue Book but let's take a quick look at how this strategy makes it very easy to confidently answer a question we're looking at a rhetorical synthesis question here and for that reason I'm going to ignore the notes they

are not going to help me all I need to do is focus on the goal in this case the goal is to present a study to an audience already familiar with environmental DNA um so familiar with environmental DNA I'm just going to go through I'm going to eliminate answers that don't do that for me a says Sarah's researchers analyzed Edna and water samples from Florida foreverglades for evidence of invasive constrictor snakes which are difficult to observe so it does seem to be talking about a study and I don't know what Edna is so it seems

like it would be for an audience familiar with it uh B says an analysis can detect the presence okay this is just saying what an analysis can do it's trying to explain something to me but if I'm already familiar with DNA I'm assuming I wouldn't need this explanation so B is out uh researchers found python DNA or environmental DNA in water samples again it's telling me that Edna is environmental DNA if I was familiar I should already know that so I'm going to get rid of c and then D we've got uh they analyze environmental

DNA that is DNA from materials released by organisms so again this little parenthetical this little bit between our dash sandwich is trying to explain stuff to me if I was already familiar with environmental DNA I would know that so I'm going to get rid of D and just like that our answer is a my next tip is to read only one sentence when you're dealing with punctuation or sentence boundaries so here I'm only going to focus on this first sentence since it contains the Blank Spot I'm going to go ahead and ignore this part the

Huntington Library in blank received a collection of I don't need to worry about that either so basically we have the Huntington Library in California received a collection now my subject is the Huntington Library in California so I could just think of that as it and then my verb is received it received do I want punctuation between my subject and my verb absolutely not so for this one I would go with d but please remember to stick with my last tip and eliminate wrong answers if you are not feeling confident like I just was it's certainly

okay to skip that step if you are 100% sure which in this case I was and you might have noticed that I was ignoring a lot of the text here other than just the sentence that I didn't focus on I got rid of this part I got rid of this part so my fourth tip is to ignore certain things namely intros long ass subjects parentheticals and prepositional phrases this last part here that I ignored is a prepositional phrase and if you've got a really long prepositional phrase like this one it's just going to bog you

down especially if you're working on conventions of Standard English so a lot of the time you could ignore those I also crossed out this little parenthetical this little comma sandwich let me show you another example of that so this one is another another great example and and just to explain what I'm talking about a parenthetical is something that can be put in parentheses it's basically non-essential information that's split off from the rest of the sentence indicated by either two commas two dashes or a set of parentheses so see if you can spot the parenthetical here

that's right we've got a dash here and another Dash here so this is a dash sandwich so I can definitely ignore all this stuff and from the answer choices here I can tell that I'm dealing with verb tense so I'm going to see if I can get away with just reading this sentence first it was there that price premiered Her First Symphony and blank supportive relationships okay so it was there that price first premiered so this is simple past tense I want simple past tense which is B and as you can see getting rid of

that parenthetical made it a lot easier for me to read through and make that connection and let's talk about the other two things that I mentioned that we haven't gone over yet the introductory phrases and the long subjects here we've got an introductory phrase and we know it's an introductory phrase because we have some sort of a phrase a comma and then the main subject so a comma doesn't necessarily mean an introductory phrase you need to identify that the main subject comes after The Comma so what I would do here is I would get rid

of in a 2016 study and then speaking of the subject this is a long ass subject it says says Eastern Washington University psychologist Amman L elele that is a lot what I would do is I would say no thank you and I would just narrow it down to one or two words so the main idea here would be something like this psychologist right and then I'm kind of thinking in my head this psychologist so that would be a great example of a really long subject that you want to simplify now see if you can spot

the other things I would eliminate in this sentence you can pause the video if you want but yep you guessed it I'm getting rid of all this cuzz we have another parenthetical we actually have a parenthetical within a parenthetical we've got the Comm sandwich and then in that we also have the parentheses sandwich so now we just have this psychologist found that there was one personality trait that they scored particularly high on openness to experience and for this one I also have a pretty confident answer but I'm going to go through the elimination steps just

to show you what that would look like so for a a period is supposed to separate two inde Clauses right if I look at the supposed sentence starting from on we get on openness to experience that is definitely not a sentence so a is out with B we have something similar going on cuz a semicolon acts like a period most of the time so what would that read like well after on we would get openness to experience openness to experience is literally just a noun phrase It's not a full sentence so again that's not going

to work C there's no punctuation so what would that look like this psychologist found that there was one personality trait that they scored particularly high on openness to experience no no that doesn't work it's a runon so C is out and by process of elimination it is going to be a our Colon D and if you want to know more about what colons do uh leave me a comment I'd be happy to make a dedicated video but I knew right off the bat that this was going to be a great answer because one of the

things that colons do best is resolving a cliffhanger so you can see we've got this Cliffhanger the psychologist found out there was one personality trait that they scored particularly high on and then you're thinking what is that one trait Cliffhanger gets resolved with openness to experience all right and my final tip for the English section is the odd verb out Trick you're going to like this one because we actually don't even need to read the text for this trick so if you identify from your answers that you're dealing with subject verb agreement all you have

to do is add a pronoun and test them to figure out which one is the odd verb out let me show you what I mean first we're going to choose either he she or it it could be any of those three I'm going to go with she for this one and then they and you don't necessarily have to write this down I'm just showing so you can see and then you go through your answers and you match up with either she or they so for a I would say she hasn't been for B I would

say she wasn't for C I would say she is isn't and for D I would say they aren't so what's the OD verb out it's the one that's different from the others D they aren't and that is the odd verb out Trick just to show how this actually works if we were to look at the paragraph um we could actually get rid of this prepositional phrase we can get rid of this parenthetical like we just talked about in tip number four and we basically have the artistic talents aren't limited to the realm of Pros so

plural they you can see that there is indeed a match but this is a really Nifty trick just remember if you have more than one answer that works that means you're dealing with tense instead of subject verb agreement so then you will have to go back and check on the text but let's not forget about the math section of the SAT this video right here is going to cover five tips to help you get closer to that dream score