I often wonder why Error ID would come after Sentence Improvement in the Writing Section of the SAT instead of the other way round. After all, Sentence Improvement is essentially an advancement of Error ID. A proven approach to Sentence Improvement questions is: look for an error in the original sentence (Error ID), fix it if there’s one and then select the answer (multiple-choice) that best matches the correction/improvement. If no error can be found, select Answer Choice A (as it is). On that ground, SAT takers would be well-advised to skirt Sentence Improvement for Error ID first.
Barring the case of the Experimental Section being a Writing one, there will only be one Writing section (within Sections 2 through 7) which poses all 3 facets of the SAT Writing component: Sentence Improvement, Error ID and Passage Improvement. Of course, if the Experimental Section in the particular SAT administration happens to be a Writing section, we then have two times of that.
It makes sense to tackle the Error ID ahead of the other two sub-sections of the SAT Writing section also because it is the quickest of the 3 question types. That means you could bag more points in less time, essentially what acing the SAT is all about, because all questions in the SAT are worth the same single point regardless of type and demand. Besides that, Error ID’s are not only low hanging fruits but also pillars to other higher order questions such as those of Sentence and Passage Improvement types.
For instance, Error ID is particularly useful in POE (Process of Elimination) when contemplating Sentence and Passage Improvement answer choices. Any choice with an error could never be a ‘best answer’ in Sentence and Passage Improvement and all wrong choices would contain at least one error which should be handily picked out by standard Error ID techniques.
Even as a seasoned campaigner of the test, I’m unable to reconcile possibly having Error ID sequenced against logical flow vis a vis Sentence Improvement in the Writing (middle) section of SAT. Pointers, anyone?
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