Do you really need to know every one of the gazillion rules of grammar to score well on the Writing section of the SAT? Not necessarily. But you do need to know the rules that will be covered on the test.

If you do a few practice sets for the Writing section, you'll start to notice that there are about a dozen or so basic grammar rules that the SAT covers. By making a focused effort to nail down these rules, you can improve your score. Here's what you need to do:

Now that you’ve begun to master SAT vocab, we’re going to move to the next big area of the test: identifying sentence errors. Every SAT, without fail, includes 18 questions that fall under this description (those SAT peeps are unnervingly consistent in this way). These 18 questions appear as part of a 25-minute Writing section, with questions increasing in difficulty as you move along.

When most people hear “sentence errors,” they immediately conjure up thoughts of participles, predicates, squinting modifiers, and all manner of grammar terminology, the sort of thing Miss Marm probably dreams about in her sleep. But here’s the deal: You don’t actually have to know all those obscure grammar terms to do well at identifying sentence errors. But you do have to have a basic understanding of the rules of written English, and you have to develop your ear for hearing problem sentences.