Everyone from the test preparation companies to the College Board agrees: making a sentence that defines the specific relationship between the stem words is the single best way to answer an analogy. Once you have the sentence, you can easily test an answer choice by replacing each stem word with the corresponding word from the answer pair. Let’s go back to the first example:

A good sentence for this analogy is, “When people are happy, they smile.” If you look at each of the answer choices, the only one that fits is (D), “When people are sad, they frown.”

Few of the analogies on the SAT will be quite this easy. Let’s try one that’s harder:

A sentence for this analogy is: a LIMB is part of a BODY. If you try out each of the answer pairs, you’ll quickly see that only one fits your sentence: a branch is part of a tree.

The truth is, while the sentence “a limb is part of a body” turned out to be good enough for the last example, it wasn’t actually the best possible sentence. The best possible sentence would have been more specific: “a limb is part of a body that extends from the main trunk.”

As you’ll see in the next example, having the most specific possible sentence can at times be very important:

You might be tempted to make the following sentence for this analogy: A METER measures DISTANCE. As you searched for the answers you would come upon, “An hourglass measures time,” fitting your sentence perfectly. And if you then happily put down (C) as your answer, you’d have gotten the question wrong. Woe is you! If you had only chosen a better, more specific sentence, none of this would have happened. For instance, if you came up with the more specific sentence: A METER is a single unit of DISTANCE measurement,” then hourglass : time doesn’t fit, since an hourglass isn’t a unit of time. But quart : volume does fit perfectly, since a quart is a single unit of volume measurement.

There’s a simple way to determine whether the sentence you’ve created is specific enough: go through every answer pair. If more than one answer pair fits with your sentence, then go back and modify the sentence so that it’s more specific.

In the case of LIMB : BODY, the sentence was good enough even though it wasn’t very specific; you were still able to whittle down the answer choices to one possibility. For METER : DISTANCE, you had to make the sentence more specific.

In other words, don’t sweat it. Come up with a sentence and try it out. If multiple answer choices fit the sentence, go back and make your sentence more specific. If no answer choices fit the sentence, check to see if you made it too specific, or if you somehow misjudged the relation between the stem words. You should definitely not waste time trying to come up with the perfect sentence.

As you practice analogies, don’t just focus on getting them right. Think about the process of getting them right. Did you come up with a good enough sentence the first time? Did you have to try a number of sentences, meaning the questions took you more time? If you pay some attention to the sentences you come up with for each question you encounter, you will train yourself to create better sentences in the future.