Sentence Completion Clues

Of the 67 questions which make up the SAT Critical Reading Sections, 19 are sentence completions. Sentence completions represent about 30% of the total reading questions. After reviewing the March 2010 score reports of many of my students, I found that, for the most part, the sentence completion success rate was less than 50%.

I believe this poor showing can be easily corrected. First, answer all the easy sentence completions first. The easy questions show up in the beginning of the section. There are no tricks to the easy questions and the answers are straightforward.

As the sentences get harder, realize that many times there are several clues in the sentence itself which allows the student to find the correct answer. These clues are much more important than the answer choices. In the more difficult sentence completions,many times the answer choices are full of words the students do not understand. However, by learning how to identify certain key words and by recognizing how the sentence is constructed, students can eliminate many obvious wrong answers. Elimination increases the accuracy of picking the correct choice from only two or three remaining choices.

Working On A New E-Book

I am working on revising my 2007 E-Book "Your Summer Study Guide and Action Plan for the SAT" Believe it or not a lot has changed in three years. This includes both my teaching methods and some of the resources I now recommend students use. The E-Book should be ready by May 1st. I will email the E-Book to anyone who asks for it free of charge. This is my gift to all. Just email me at steve@testniques.com and I will send it to you via PDF file.