The most important tool to cultivate before test day is your reading ear: you want to be able to “hear” errors as you read the test sentences. One excellent way to nurture your reading ear is to actually read. Regardless of whether you’re looking at this book a year, a month, or a week before you plan to take the SAT II Writing, you should start reading for an hour every day. Reading instant messages, or reading the book you’re assigned for English class as you simultaneously watch television—that kind of reading doesn’t count. Read novels, or the newspaper; if you’ve had a terrible day and can’t face the next chapter or the Metro section, read a trashy magazine, but read it carefully and without distractions.

When you read something well written, you see correct sentence structure and grammar over and over and over. Soon, correctly written sentences become familiar to you. After you read several thousand good sentences, a bad sentence will seem painfully obvious. That’s the goal of all this reading: when you sit down to the SAT II Writing, you want to look at those sentences and see each error as quickly and clearly as if it were highlighted, italicized, and printed in bold.

Reading will also help you enormously on the essay. As you’re writing the essay, if you have that good-sentence groove carved into your brain, all you have to do is model your sentence structure on all of the thousands of grammatically correct sentences you’ve read in your novels and magazines, and you’ll be writing well.