General Reading & Writing Strategy

While some strategies apply to the whole test, there are some strategies that are specific to a section of the SAT, and others that are even more specific to types of questions within a section. Later, we'll get into more detailed and specific strategies for the Reading & Writing section, but on this page we'll cover some high-level strategies that apply to the Reading & Writing section as a whole.

On each problem, the first thing you should do is jump to reading the actual question itself, after the passage. Because the Reading & Writing problems fall into distinct question types, you'll be able to identify what type of question you're dealing with by looking at the question. Then you'll know what to be looking for and strategies to employ.

In the Reading & Writing section, the questions are grouped together by question type, and the types of questions always fall in the same order. This means you can have a general idea of where Standard English questions will be, where Words in Context questions will be, and so on. As you get more familiar with the test and the types of questions, you'll get a sense of which types of questions you perform best on. Many students find it helpful to start with the types of questions they are best at and most comfortable with. This helps ensure that you actually get to spend time on the questions you're most likely to get right. It also helps warm up your brain, so that hopefully you'll be more ready to tackle the harder questions when you get to them. Additionally, it can be a confidence booster off the bat which can help with your overall mentality, and lead to a better overall score.

Obviously, the College Board can't have everyone getting an 800 on the Reading & Writing section, so they need a lot of people to choose the wrong answers. To accomplish this, they have a number of tricks up their sleeve, but they have a tendency to reuse the same tricks. By learning the ways in which they dress up wrong answers to make them tempting to the untrained eye, you can avoid them and increase your chances of getting the right answer. We'll cover some of these tricks in more detail later, but for now, just be aware that they exist.

It's impossible to learn every single vocab word that might possibly show up on the SAT. It's also very difficult to learn how to perfectly interpret very complex and dense passages. But one subset of questions that can really be mastered is Standard English questions. On the SAT, there is a relatively small number of actual grammatical rules that they will test. By learning these rules and applying our clearly defined strategy for approaching them, you should be able to master these questions and always get them right.

To many, the Reading & Writing section can seem more subjective than the Math section. In math, there's clearly one right answer, but in Reading & Writing, it can seem like things are more open to interpretation. While this is true to some extent, the College Board puts a lot of effort from a lot of very smart people into making sure that each question only has one answer that can be strongly defended as the right one. The other 3 answers will always have at least some fatal flaw, even if they seem very close to being right - you just have to spot that flaw.

The right answer is often a paraphrase of what you might be looking for, and is often somewhat vaguely worded. It might not always jump out at you as the answer you were looking for. But if you interpret it carefully, you'll always find that it can be backed up by the passage. Don't rule out an answer just because it uses language that seems different from what you see in the passage. Look at each answer choice critically and see if you can find something wrong with it.Ultimately, you're looking for the answer that you can't make a strong argument against.

Some passages will be about scientific studies, and might use scientific words you aren't familiar with. Don't let this intimidate you. The College Board is not testing your knowledge of science, but rather your ability to understand the passage. If you don't know what a word means, you'll be able to infer enough about it from the context of the passage. Like if it mentions the name of a species of bacteria, don't worry about what that species is, just focus on the information that it gives you about the bacteria.

When you read a passage, try to come up with a simplification in your head of what each sentence is saying. This willl help make sure you actually processed the meaning of the sentence, which might be necessary to understanding the next sentence.The Bluebook app provides an annotation feature, which some students find helpful for summarizing passages. I don't necessarily recommend using it because it can take extra time, but use it if you feel it helps you. Otherwise, at least try to summarize the passage in your head.