Polysyllabic

I just finished reading Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey, a book that purports to tell the history of sentence diagramming. It's not as bad as I had imagined it would be. I had braced myself for an old-fashioned paean to the virtues of diagramming, but in fact Florey is honest about the limitations of diagrams and skeptical about claims that diagramming helps improve one's writing.

That said, there are irritating errors in the book.

This is part of a continuing series documenting the shortcomings of the College Board's view of grammar, particularly as exemplified in its explanations for multiple-choice writing questions. (Part 1, part 2, and part 3 here). Please see part 1 for an explanation of how I reference individual questions.

This is part 3 of a series analyzing the College Board's view of English grammar. In part 1 I reviewed the general standards for the SAT writing test and argued that they were vague. In part 2, I began to reverse-engineer the grammatical framework used by the test makers and found numerous errors in the explanatory answers that the College Board provides with its practice tests.

This is part 2 of a series.
(Part 1, Part 3)

The instructions for the writing sections of the the SAT ask the test taker to use the conventions of "standard written English" in finding correct answers. But as I noted in part 1 of this article, the public specifications as to what that means, are vague.

The following article is part 1 in a series.

Some time ago, I wrote about a flawed question, in The Official SAT Study Guide from the College Board. In trying to understand the thinking of the question writer, I reviewed the official explanations to the test that are available on the College Board's website through its online course.