Do you sometimes feel you don’t even know where to aim, when it comes to grammar? Feel overwhelmed by the number of rules you must learn?
Just slow down a minute. You can learn to break any large task into smaller pieces. Then proceed to learn each part well from an expert. Who’s an expert? Learn about the types of grammar errors, as collated by Erica Meltzer.
Erica Meltzer, one of the most prolific SAT writers and researchers, has categorized all errors from actual SAT exams.
If you’d like more in-depth explanations of these rules, along with extensive exercises, please consider ordering a copy of The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar.
Error-Identification Categories
1) Subject-Verb Agreement
2) Verb Tense
3) Pronoun Case
4) Antecedent Pronoun (Pronoun Agreement)
5) Adjective vs. Adverb
6) Parallelism
7) Prepositions
8) Faulty Comparisons
9) Comparatives vs. Superlatives
10) Double negatives/Double positives
11) Word Pairs
12) Noun Agreement
13) Relative Pronouns
14) Coordinating Conjunctions
15) Usage
16) Redundancy
Note: while other kinds of errors (e.g. misplaced modifiers) may occasionally appear, they are extremely rare and are therefore not covered here. Although you can expect to find errors from a number of categories included in each section, the first four categories (Verb and Pronoun Errors) generally appear most frequently. It is therefore recommended that you take some time to familiarize yourself with the kinds of sentence structures in which they appear. The remaining categories are listed in approximate order frequency.
Some other well-known sources for grammar and writing
Newly revised, 2011, version of this world-known classic.
Ms. Meltzer has created additional SAT writing tests for you to test your understanding of grammar.
