Syntax

There are two main types of homonyms (words that are the same):

Sometimes, Writing section questions have more than one multiple-choice answers that are grammatically correct. In these cases, the correct answer is the shorter one. What makes an option more concise than others:

An appositive is a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase that give information about the noun or pronoun before it.  One thing to note about appositives is that they are not necessary to the meaning of the sentence.  Appositives are surrounded by parenthetical commas and can be deleted without changing the meaning or the grammatical correctness of the sentence.

There are three types of sentences:

Simple Sentences: The simplest of simple sentences have a simple subject (one actor or set of actors) and a simple predicate (one action).  

The dog ate.

The mouse ran.

Simple sentences can have compound subjects (two actors joined with a conjunction):

The dog and the cat ate.

The best writing conveys its points clearly and concisely, without extra or unnecessary words.

One way that standardized tests assess whether or not students can write concisely is by checking if students can eliminate redundancy.

Redundancy is when a point is made more than once (either in an entire passage or paragraph or even in a single sentence).

Sometimes redundancy sounds fine. Repetition is true; it's just not good writing.

Let's look at some examples of redundancy:

When writing and speaking, we often use transition words to connect ideas and sentences. The right transition word can make all of your ideas flow together logically.  The wrong transition word can completely change your meaning!

There are two common ways in which we write improper sentences.  Improper sentences include run-on sentences and sentence fragments. These are easy to remember because of their names! Run-on sentences run on and on and look like a bunch of sentences mashed into one. Fragments are literally pieces of sentences; they are not complete sentences, but they are trying to stand alone.

Parallelism applies to lists (including lists that are embedded in sentences or phrases).

When you make lists of any kind, the lists should be grammatically parallel.  They should...

The subject of the sentence is the main subject or actor of the sentence; it can be any kind of noun (a person, place, or thing).

In the following sentences, the subject is underlined:

The dog ate my homework

Love is a powerful emotion.

The last day of school is in June.

When you make a comparison, make sure you compare two things of the same type.  SAT often compares two items but fails to fully describe one, so that it seems like two totally different objects are being compared.  Those types of sentences make sense in speech but not in writing.

For instance, you might say out loud to a friend:

 “Our dogs are better behaved than the neighbors.”