What the Writing Section Tests
The SAT Writing
section tests your writing skills in two different ways:
-
An Essay Question
- Multiple-Choice
Questions
The essay gives you 25 minutes to take a position on a
broad topic and back it up with examples. One question. One answer.
In contrast, the SAT also contains 49 multiple choice questions,
and these 49 questions are broken into three types:
- 25 Improving Sentences
- 18 Identifying Sentence Errors
- 6 Improving Paragraphs
The entire “Writing Section” of the SAT is actually
made up three smaller timed sections. Two of the timed sections
are 25-minutes long, and one is 10 minutes long. Here’s what each
of the timed sections will contain:
- 25-minute section: The essay
- 25-minute section: 11 Improving Sentences, 18 Identifying
Sentence Errors, and 6 Improving Paragraphs
- 10-minute section: 14 Improving Sentences
The 25-minute section that contains the essay will always
be the first timed section of the entire SAT. The other two
sections might appear in various places in the test, but in general
the multiple-choice 25-minute section will appear somewhere in the
middle, and the 10-minute section will appear near the end.
