Title: The College Panda’s SAT Writing: Advanced Guide and Workbook for the New SAT

By Nielson Phu

286 Pages

I have completed this book cover to cover, and overall it is an excellent break down of the SAT’s Writing & Language section. The book organizes grammar concepts based on usage on the test and provides lots of practice to drill the patterns of errors.

The book covers the following: Relative Clauses, Prepositional Phrases, Idioms, Subject/Verb Agreement, Modifiers, Run-ons, Fragments, Redundancy, Parallelism, Pronoun Reference, Tense, Commas, Dashes, Colons, Apostrophes, Word Choice, Transitions, Topic and Concluding Sentences, Supporting Evidence, Relevance, Placement, Point of View, Comparatives, Who/Whom, Combining Sentences, and Data Interpretation. Additionally there is a nice summary review of the errors and 2 practice Writing & Language tests.

The patterns are clearly explained, and then a series of examples and practice questions are given. The questions mimic well the College Board’s test structure and are a good guideline to the potential questions.

If you have solid reading/writing skills and just need to understand what the test is looking for exactly then this would be a great choice for a test prep book for the Writing & Language section.

However, if English is not your first language or you don’t really understand the difference between a clause and a phrase then perhaps you need to start with a grammar review before jumping into test prep. A solid understanding of grammar will also help with reading comprehension.