A machine, not a person, will score the multiple-choice questions on the SAT II Writing Test. The tabulating machine sees only the filled-in ovals on your answer sheet and does not care how you came to these answers; it just impassively notes if your answers are correct. So whether you knew the right answer immediately or took a lucky guess, the machine will award you one point. It doesn’t award extra points if you’ve spent a really long time getting the right answer. It doesn’t award extra points if you managed to get a tricky question right. Think of the multiple-choice test as a message to you from the ETS: “We care only about your answers. We do not care about the work behind those answers.”

So you should give ETS as many right answers as possible. SAT II Writing not only allows you to show off your intelligence and your knowledge of writing, it allows you to show off your fox-like cunning by figuring out what strategies will allow you to best display that knowledge.

Because the multiple-choice section of SAT II Writing actually contains three different types of questions, we cover type-specific strategies in the chapters devoted to the three different question types. But there are a number of strategies that apply to the entire test, and those will be covered in this chapter.