Using the Similarity of SAT II Writing
for Personal Gain
Suppose you sit down in a quiet room and spend an hour
taking the practice test. Once you’ve completed the test, you flip
to the back of the book and check your answers. You get to question
10 and notice that you got it wrong. You look back at the question,
and see that number 10 asked about this sentence:
| At a crucial juncture in the movie,
someone reached for their box of candy and loudly removed the plastic
packaging. |
You chose (E), no error, which turns out to be the wrong
answer. As you puzzle over the question, you realize that you don’t
understand why you got the answer wrong. The sentence looks perfectly
fine to you! You start paging through this very book, looking
for tips on the Identifying Sentence Errors section. Seeing that
tense errors are common in this section, you check for a tense error
in the sentence. No dice. Reading on, you find a tip: look out for
the pronoun their, which people often use incorrectly
in speech in an effort to avoid using a gender-specific singular
pronoun. You realize that you didn’t catch the error in
number 10 (which should read, by the way, At a crucial juncture
in the movie, someone reached for his or her box of candy and loudly
removed the plastic packaging) because you didn’t understand
that their is incorrect in that context
because someone is singular and so must be matched
with a singular pronoun. You now promise that you will exercise
extra caution when you see their in a sentence.
Also, you now feel confident and smart, because you understand one
of the rules governing pronouns.
