In the next two weeks, many of you will undergo the yearly torture-fest—ahem, challenging test-taking experience—that is the AP Exams. Even if you’ve aced your practice tests and obsessively studied your flashcards for the past three months, you’ve still got a big task ahead of you: enduring the free response portion of the exam.
As many of you know, it’s AP exam season. If thinking about taking your AP tests makes you nervous, you’re not alone. Here’s an email we received from one worried Sparkler:
I am currently taking AP USH and AP Eng. However, I am not doing so well when it comes to writing essays. The AP exams are coming up soon, and I would like to know what you guys would suggest I do to better prepare myself. I write plenty of essays, but I don’t get them back until many weeks later, and by that time, I've all but forgotten what the topic was over. Thanks for the advice!
Though it can seem like a challenge to prepare for the essay portion of any test when you don’t know what the essay topic will be, there are some simple things you can do to improve your AP essay scores. Here they are:
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:
One of the most frustrating grammar topics encountered on the SAT and ACT (and in life in general, really) is the correct use of subject and object pronouns—specifically when to use who (subject pronoun) and when to use whom (object pronoun). Who cares, you might ask? (Or should that be "Whom cares?") But getting this right is easy, and getting it wrong can cost you points, so it's worth reviewing.
Here's a simple, non-technical way to tell the difference between a subject and an object: The subject of a sentence or independent clause is the thing doing the action; the object is that thing that the action is done to. Simple, right? Here's an example:
After a large bouquet of pink roses was clandestinely delivered to the sorority house, the girls were in a frenzy all afternoon, as no one knew the sender of the bouquet, nor for whom it was intended.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about strategies for writing the best introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions you possibly can in the 25 minutes you’re given to compose your SAT essay. What we haven’t discussed is how to actually come up with your essay topic after reading the prompt.
Let’s say that the prompt is “A good leader should be feared rather than loved. Do you agree or disagree?” If you're like us, your first response might be something like I have absolutely no idea what position I should take on that issue. Here's a method to help you quickly figure out what stance you should take.
If you’re like many SAT essay writers, you struggle to come up with a great way to wrap up your essay. You might end things by repeating the thesis statement and main points, sometimes word for word. Or you might take the opposite route and bring up a bunch of new information in the conclusion, which will only leave the graders scratching their heads, wondering, what did that have to do with the rest of the essay? Neither technique is ideal.
If you're familiar with the Identifying Sentence Error questions in the SAT Writing section, then you know that lurking among the verb tense errors and pronoun agreement mishaps are these sneaky little things called idioms. Idioms are quirky grammatical constructions that are intended to be taken figuratively. Each language has its own collection of idioms, and most people are so used to hearing them that they never think about them. For example, it would be correct to say "I live on this street." There's no specific rule explaining why we say we live "on" a street rather than "in" a street. But saying "I live in this street" is dead wrong (and it would cost you points on the test).
