A pronoun can often be used as a substitute for a noun in a sentence. Anytime a pronoun is used in a passage, that pronoun must have a clear antecedent; that is, it must directly connect to a noun or pronoun that was mentioned before it.
Wrong: Jim, Jerry, and Frank were best friends; unfortunately he never talks to them anymore.
Whoa now! Who is this “he” we are talking about? And what group of people makes up “them?” The sentence, as it stands, does not give us enough context to justify use of the pronoun “he”.
Correct: Jim, Jerry, and Frank were best friends; unfortunately Jerry never speaks to the other two anymore.
Anytime you are reading a passage and you find yourself confused by a pronoun, look over the sentence again and try to clarify what or whom the pronoun is referring to; if you can’t, make a note and move on. That unclear pronoun may come back as a question in mere moments!
When the noun that a pronoun refers to is missing or unclear, it is necessary to include the specific name of the person, place, or thing to ensure your sentence is clear and correct.
Given a choice between a pronoun such as it or they and a noun naming a specific person or thing, the noun will virtually always be correct even when it appears in the longest answer.
An EMPHATIC PRONOUN is a pronoun that emphasizes its antecedent. Emphatic pronouns always end with “self’ or “selves.” Some emphatic pronouns are MYSELF, HIMSELF, HERSELF, YOURSELF, ITSELF, THEMSELVES, OURSELVES, and YOURSELVES.
Note: Emphatic pronouns are never surrounded by commas.
It can get tricky trying to determine when to use either “I” or “me” in your writing. Thankfully, once you get exposed to enough of these questions, you’ll start to develop an eye to detect the subtle differences between the two.
First, use your ear and your common sense. If something does not sound right or looks awkward, it probably is. Be sure not to overthink.
Use “me” when you are receiving an action. You may or may not be the subject.
In all three instances, you are receiving the action. You are receiving the football, given a paycheck, and thrown a party. “I,” on the other hand, is used when you are performing an action.
Here, you are the one who is doing all of the actions. You also happen to be the subject.
Those examples might seem silly, so here’s a more difficult example that you might have more trouble with. You may see a question on the SAT where the answer comes down to deciding between “and me/me and” or “and I.” To help identify the correct answer, take out the extraneous subjects and then look for which one sounds better or makes more sense.
Wrong: Me and Hannah went to the store.
To fix the error, first take out the other person: Me and Hannah went to the store.
You can see that’s not correct, so you know you can change “me” to the proper case: I went to the store.
Lastly, add the other person back in: Hannah and I went to the store.
Works like magic!
If there’s one pronoun that seems to perplex all our AP Guru students, it’s the issue of when to use the word ‘WHO’ and when to use ‘WHOM.’
Use the following to help you determine the appropriate use of ‘who’ and ‘whom’ in a sentence:
1. Whom is always used immediately following a preposition. If you see a preposition, followed by “who/whom,” make sure that it’s ‘whom.’
2. Who is always the subject, and WHOM is always the object. The simplest way to think about the “non-preposition” use of the words “who” and “whom” is in terms of subject and object. “Who” is always the subject of a sentence, and the word whom is always the object of a sentence.
Remember this really, really easy trick: “he vs. him.”
If you would use ‘he’ in a sentence, replace “he” with ‘who’, and if you’d use ‘him’ in a sentence, replace the word “him” with ‘whom.’
Keep the point of view the same within sentences and within paragraphs.
Correct: If one does not believe, one will not succeed.
Any time a pronoun is used to replace a noun, that pronoun must agree in both number and gender with the antecedent noun to which it refers. Singular pronouns (e.g. she, it) must agree with singular nouns, and plural pronouns (e.g. they) must agree with plural nouns.
Pronouns can refer to either people or things. Some pronouns can refer only to people, some can refer only to things, and some can refer to both.
When you see a set of answer choices that include both singular and plural pronouns, you should always take a moment to determine which noun the underlined pronoun refers to.
Otherwise, you are very likely to be confused by answers that are grammatically correct but that create disagreements when plugged back into the passage.
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The SAT Writing and Language Test repeatedly tests the proper usage of verb tenses. Knowing when to use different verb tenses and forms will be extremely beneficial to you on this part of the test.
The SAT Writing & language section usually tests 2-3 questions on subject-verb agreement on every test. Here we tell you all you need to know about subject-verb agreements on the SAT.
A pronoun can often be used as a substitute for a noun in a sentence. Anytime a pronoun is used in a passage, that pronoun must have a clear antecedent; that is, it must directly connect to a noun or pronoun that was mentioned before it.
Parallelism is a very strange concept. Unlike commas, semicolons, pronouns, tenses, etc., parallelism isn’t applied to just a single area of grammar – it spans all aspects of the English language.
There are many pesky little grammar rules that you’ll be tested on as part of the SAT. Therefore, it’s important to not just know these grammar rules, but also how test questions are structured .
Though sentence structures are rarely tested on the SAT, you will need to understand them to accurately answer comma-based questions.
The comma is widely used in writing and is the most commonly tested concept on the SAT Writing and Language Test. Therefore, it’s extremely important to understand how to correctly use commas and when to avoid them.
Even though comma usage is the most prominent punctuation rule tested on the SAT, other punctuation such as semicolons, colons, dashes, and apostrophes are frequently tested as well.
Modifiers are words, phrases or clauses used to describe something in a sentence. They are often tested on the SAT in the form of comma usage.
The SAT Writing and Language Test is a passage-based test. There are four multi-paragraph passages and 44 questions to go with them. The makers of the SAT break this test down into two main sections: Usage and Mechanics and Rhetorical Skills.