How to Improve Your SAT Reading and Writing Score – Strategies for Success
Math may be your strong suit and critical to your chosen educational goals and future career path – but the combined reading and writing score on your SAT can drag your overall score down and interfere with your dreams.
If you’re struggling to get your SAT reading and writing score above 600 – much less 700 – you need to approach the problem with a new strategy.
Understand How the SAT Is Designed to Trick You
The first thing you need to do is be conscious of the fact that the SAT purposely tries to deceive you into picking the wrong answers. Although each question on the reading comprehension test only has one correct answer, students can be fooled by:
- Distractor choices, that include “close but not correct” answers, answers that are partially true and “always” or “never language that is way too definitive
- Misleading phrases, like “most likely” or “primarily,” which are designed to make it seem like more than one answer could be correct
- Sentences that are designed to hide specific grammar flaws in the written test, particularly where subject-verb agreement or run-on sentences are involved
Once you know that there are specific “tricks” being used to confuse students, you can start to spot them – and avoid falling prey – more easily.
Focus on Your Active Reading, Vocabulary-Building and Grammar Skills
Ultimately you need to have strong reading skills, a well-developed vocabulary and a clear understanding of basic grammar rules.
Even if you generally write well, you may not have an active understanding of the rules of grammar – so up your study game. The SAT tends to focus on a few key areas of grammar such as punctuation, so get a guidebook or chart that goes over these rules carefully and study them closely.
Active reading can help boost both your vocabulary skills and your comprehension abilities. Make notes in the margins of your books to summarize key points or summarize what you’ve read out loud, in your own words. This helps you more deeply comprehend what you are reading and keeps you from unintentionally “skimming” over a paragraph or two.
Consider Practice Tests and Get Feedback from Others
Practice really does make perfect when it comes to the SAT – or will, at minimum, make you more comfortable with the format of the test. Now that you know what tricks the SAT may throw your way, take practice tests so that you can look for them. Practice tests can also help you learn to pace yourself during the actual testing and how to effectively use the process of elimination and strategic guessing to your advantage.
Finally, direct feedback from other people can help you better understand your own strengths and weaknesses and spot patterns that you might otherwise overlook. Join (or form) a study group so that you can discuss test-taking strategies with others or talk about some of the more difficult concepts you need to master.
Tutoring, too, can be invaluable when it comes to preparing for the SAT. There are all kinds of programs that you can enroll in that can help you figure out effective strategies for improving your score, and private tutors can also be invaluable.
A side benefit of all this studying for the reading and writing section of the SAT is that you’ll also enhance your abilities when it comes to writing that all-important admissions essay when the time comes to submit your application to the college or university of your dreams.