Writing the Big Essays

One of the most important things to do on the SAT Critical Reading sections is to silence the voices whispering wrong answers to you.  And where do those voices come from?  A difficult childhood?  Head injuries?  No.  Those voices are the choices that accompany each question.

Far too many students learn only one technique for Critical Reading, the technique called P.O.E. or Process of Elimination.  It’s interesting that the acronym P.O.E. spells the name Poe, as in Edgar Allen Poe, because he too may have had a problem with hearing voices in his head.

The choices are carefully designed to fool you, to entice you into making the wrong choice.  And P.O.E. without enough information can lead you down a dark road.

Imagine what would happen if there were no choices on the SAT?  What if the test gave you a reading passage with questions but no choices and you had to write a few sentences to answer each question?  Would you do better or worse on the exam?  Contemplate that for a moment.

Whether you’re dealing with Sentence Completion vocabulary questions, or the reading comprehension questions on short, paired, or long reading passages, there’s really no reason you shouldn’t be able to answer the questions without the choices.

On Sentence Completion questions, you’d have to understand the sentence given, and use logic and your own vocabulary to put words into the sentences that would complete them so that they made sense.

On the reading questions, you’d have to read the relevant part of the passage, contemplate the question, and come up with an answer.

And therein is the secret to success.  Just because they do give you choices, doesn’t mean you have to look at them.  At least, not before you have your own answer in mind.

On the Sentence Completions, when you do have your own answer in mind (words that complete the sentence) look at the choices and find synonyms of your words.  Those synonyms are the correct answers.

On the reading passages, first convert the SAT question into a real question – one that starts with a question word, like “how” or “why.”  Then read the relevant portion of the text.  If the question asks you about lines 15 to 16, read from around line 12 to line 20.  If lines 12 to 20 represent almost a whole paragraph, then go ahead and read the whole paragraph.  Based on what you read, ask yourself what the answer to the question is.  Then armed with that answer look at the choices.  Find that one that most closely matches the answer you came up with.  That choice is the correct answer – the rest of the choices are just distractions.

Let’s see this in action.

The events that happen in our lives transform in our memories into subjective half-truths.  We edit, expurgate, and abridge.  Inadvertently, we block, sequester, and delete.  When the time comes to write a memoir, we may as well call it fiction.  What we produce is far more of a fiction than we planned.  We do not deliberately try to change things; we set out to tell the truth.  We do not fail because we are incompetent, but because our records have undergone an unconscious metamorphosis.

In this passage, “… we block, sequester, and delete” implies:

A) Editing involves removing sections of a text

B) Writers need privacy to write

C)  Writers deliberately ignore parts of their memories

D) Negative memories are often forgotten

E)  People have poor memories

If we were to look only at the phrase in question, and then look at the choices, we might easily choose the wrong answer.  But after reading the entire paragraph, it’s clear that this passage is about how imperfect memory can be, and thus choice D becomes the best choice.

To sum this up with a procedure:

1) Read the blurb (always read the blurb)

2) Read the question

3) Change the question into a “real” question, with a question word

4) Read a block of text large enough to catch the full meaning of the section a question is asking about.

5) Answer the question with your own idea

6) Match your idea to the choices

You might even try practicing this by hiding the answer choices on a practice test, and trying to answer in your own words.  See how you do, and remember:  don’t let the choices whisper wrong answers to you.  Trust your reasoning, not your feelings.

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