tl;dr: The highest scorers don’t need to memorize and apply grammar and punctuation rules to ace the SAT writing questions, and you might be able to approach the SAT the same way they do.
Though nearly all students who are preparing for the SAT are told that they need to memorize grammar and punctuation rules and then consciously think about and apply those rules while answering writing questions, the inconvenient truth is that the very highest scorers employ a completely different mental process for identifying correct grammar and punctuation. Those expert readers rely on their absorption of the language, not on memorization of rules.
It’s important, when discussing “correct” grammar and punctuation, to note that the rules for a natural language such as English didn’t come first; no one decided to invent a new language and call it English and then devised the rules that people had to follow to speak and write. The language came into existence and evolved organically due to people needing to express themselves by using speech and writing (which attempts to capture speech in visual form, as when a comma reflects a certain kind of inflection and pause in spoken English). When linguists analyze how people speak and write a natural language, they will find patterns of things that happen–and that don’t happen–almost all the time, and for lack of a better term, we refer to those patterns as “rules,” but they’re not like the rules of a game or sport, which are invented by people and which define the permissible action.
You can’t play a game or sport without knowing the rules, but people have no difficulty using a natural language without knowing the “rules,” even though they are obeying them. Native English speakers acquire their ability to communicate in the language through absorption from exposure to other speakers and writers, not through memorization of a bunch of rules. They learn how to speak and write correctly by listening to others speak and, crucially, by reading lots of well-written English.
This means that fluent users of a language don’t think about grammar and punctuation rules at all when writing, yet they can produce correct written English; by the same token, they don’t consciously think about rules when analyzing writing for grammatical and punctuation errors, which is a process very similar to writing. The students who simply breeze through the writing questions on the SAT are in this group. But we want to point out that this category also includes expert tutors. Though they are adept at breaking down correct and incorrect answers through the lens of formal rules when explaining why answers are right or wrong, tutors will admit (when pressed) that they don’t actually think about rules at all when they’re assessing SAT writing question answer choices for correctness; any rule-oriented analysis only takes place after the fact for the purposes of explanation, but it’s unneeded by these experts during their initial read-through and determination of the correct answer to each such question. Again, proficient users of a natural language don’t think in rules when creating correct writing or when analyzing others’ writing for correctness.
We confess that we fall squarely into this category too, by the way. When we go through the grammar-based writing questions on an SAT, we just…read and answer. The right answers are totally harmonious to us, while the wrong answers stick out jaggedly, producing a discordant sound in our mind’s ear (if that’s a thing). But when we have to produce an explanation for why our answers are correct, we can’t just say, “oh, because this sounds right and all those sound wrong,” even though that’s the truth; that would be unhelpful in the extreme, because if that were sufficient to enlighten and empower a student, they probably wouldn’t need any explanation to begin with. So, we, too, put on our linguistic analyst hats and dig up a rule that applies to the situation. But our own approach to answering the questions–and its success–is based in our absorption of English, not in our memorization of the rules that have been found to be present in the language (we confess that we don’t even know some of the rules, even though we comply with them when writing and can determine when they’re violated in material we’re reading). In recognition of this dissonance, we’re developing alternative teaching approaches that guide students towards using absorption-based methods rather than rules-memorization techniques.
We’ve decided that it’s very important to bring this dichotomy in the approaches of fluent English users and less-skilled speakers/writers into the open for the benefit of students who aren’t (yet) highly proficient in English. Why should only good readers/writers be able to benefit from the use of a highly-effective approach that requires no memorization or explicit rule-application, while less-proficient readers are always directed onto a totally different track and told to use a completely distinct method to answer the very same questions? Why do even the most expert SAT tutors use one mental process themselves, but teach their students a completely different one?
Awareness of writing rules does have its place when it comes to answering SAT writing questions. Some students, particularly those for whom English is not their first language, as well as native speakers who have never established a regular reading habit, will simply not have the luxury of the time needed to digest the large quantities of well-written adult-level English materials that are required to absorb the patterns of good and correct writing. Put simply, they’re not going to become fluent English users in the limited time they have to prepare for the test. For these students, a rule-driven approach is their only realistic option; it’s interesting to note that this roughly mirrors how foreign languages are typically taught in school, with rules being memorized for everything from verb conjugations to grammar and punctuation (despite most students being blissfully unaware of those rules in their native languages—because they don’t need to be!). For some students—those who have had greater exposure to well-written English, but who are not going to become fluent readers/writers in the time they have for preparation—a hybrid approach is workable; when answering reading questions, they can both scan the text and feel for the best-sounding answer while backstopping that approach with their knowledge of rules when the first approach is inconclusive.
But there is also a significant group of students for whom the purer, more natural approach used automatically by the best readers is within reach. This group includes students who, by virtue of having read a lot, already possess the needed abilities, but those skills aren’t (yet) reliably accessible, so these students need some guidance to help them unlock the tools they already possess. That guidance takes the form of showing students techniques that help them transform complicated sentences into simpler forms that make it possible for the student to recognize the correct answer choices, and demonstrating simple checks that help bring correct and incorrect usage into high relief for easier recognition. Notice that these techniques bear no resemblance to the typical toolkit of rules that students are compelled to memorize when learning grammar and punctuation.
There are also students who just haven’t read enough to acquire the automatic recognition of correct writing but for whom there is still ample time available to invest in absorbing the patterns of written English through establishment of a solid reading habit, and that can empower those students to become proficient readers and identifiers of correct English in a largely or completely rule-free way. After all, where the opportunity exists, why shouldn’t lesser readers take a path to equip themselves with the skills needed to let them answer these grammar and punctuation questions with the same direct, fluid, just-read-and-answer process used by great readers?
We think the optimal way for students to approach SAT writing questions is to absorb the patterns of correct English writing so that those patterns become deeply embedded into their minds, and then to let that mechanism naturally work on its own as it does so effectively for the highest scorers. That means becoming a great reader, and to become a great reader, a student should read as much as possible. There is no substitute for exposure to large quantities of well-written materials when it comes to absorbing the patterns of proper English. And, of course, this process also boosts reading comprehension, which is vigorously tested on the other questions in the SAT’s English section.
If you want to be able to answer writing questions the way the highest scorers do, and you have the time needed to absorb enough well-written English to get there, start reading, and keep reading.