Are you taking the Digital SAT and hoping to boost your Reading and Writing section score? Focusing on vocab and Sentence Completion questions—the ones that appear at the beginning of the modules—can be a great way to do that.
But how, you ask?
Well, I'm a leading SAT and ACT expert who’s helped hundreds of students score higher on these tests than they’d ever thought possible. So I’ve spent quite a bit of time figuring out how my clients can move through the test more quickly and accurately.
And today I’m going to help you decode Sentence Completion questions and give you my favorite strategy for getting as many of them correct as you possibly can….even if you’re not someone who considers vocabulary a strong suit!
Article Contents
1. Watch this article as a video
2. What are Sentence Completion Qs on the Digital SAT?
a. Example
3. The most common vocabulary question mistake on the Digital SAT
4. The best Sentence Completion strategy
6. Conclusion
Video version of this article:
What are sentence completion questions?
Before we get into the best-ever strategy for acing these types of Qs, I want to explain what they actually look like—and where you're going to find them in the Reading and Writing modules.
In both module one and module two of the Reading and Writing section, The very first set of questions that you will encounter will be Sentence Completion questions, also known as vocabulary questions. These will typically comprise two to eight questions.
In this genre of question, you’ll be given a text (typically a short paragraph). The text will feature an underline with a missing word. The question will ask you, “Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?” (Literally, they ask it the same way every single time.) Then, you’ll be given four vocab words as your four answer options.
Sentence Completeion question example
Here’s a hypothetical example of what that might actually look like on the test:
***
The most frequently occurring type of _______ color vision is red-green color blindness. Some people with this condition are so minimally impacted that they do not realize their vision differs from the norm unless they undergo testing.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A) moderate
B) anomalous
C) affected
D) precarious
The most common vocab mistake on the SAT
When they see one of these questions, most students will immediately begin looking at the answer choices and trying to quiz themselves on what each of the four vocab words means, then trying to plug them into the blank to see if they make sense there.
This is an intuitive approach, but it’s NOT the one you want to take!
Because here’s what's going to happen if you do it that way.
The answer choices may have an undue influence on you—and make you doubt yourself. What I mean by that is this: as you plug in each of the four words that the test has offered you as options, there’s a good chance that more than one of them will look solid once it’s been added to the paragraph. Your brain will be unconsciously working to make the sentence make sense. Then you’re stuck trying to choose between two or (God forbid) three answers that all kinda work.
How to answer SAT Sentence Completion questions
Here’s what you’re going to do instead. (I’m bringing you this strategy for free—but my virtual Digital SAT Reading and Writing course offers a second very effective strategy, if you like to have options!)
Step 1: Read the paragraph of text. When you get to the underline part, you're going to say the word “blank” in your head. And whatever you do, do NOT look at the answer choices yet!
Step 2: Though the SAT is now fully digital (and has been for some time), you’ve hopefully packed smart and brought a writing utensil and some scratch paper with you. So, somewhere on your piece of paper, you are going to write down the word or phrase that you think should go in the blank.
Now, this does NOT need to be like a fancy vocabulary word. It could be a simple term or phrase—“helpful,” “good,” “NOT handsome,” etc. Bonus points if you see a word that's already used in the text and you think to yourself, “Oh, ‘sophisticated’! Yeah. The blank needs to mean the same thing.”
Step 3: Now you are going to proceed to the four answer choices that the test has provided, and you are going to compare the word or phrase you’ve jotted down to each of those choices. For most of the options, you’ll likely say to yourself, “Oh, that doesn’t at all mean the same thing as what I generated!” Each time this happens, you can eliminate that answer choice.
If you encounter a vocab word in the list of options and you don’t know what the word means, leave it in. And of course, if you find an answer choice that does equate to what you independently came up with, you’ll leave that among the list of remaining possibilities, too.
Step 4 (optional): If you proceed through those steps and are still left deliberating between more than one answer choice, ask yourself: “Is this similar to any other word that I may have used, heard, or read before?” That might be enough to help you jog your memory. If you happen to know any Greek or Latin roots, those can be super helpful, too.
Why this method works
The great thing about this approach is that if you know even three of the vocab words provided among the answer choices, you can still feel confident that you’ve gotten the question right. Sometimes, through the process of elimination, it means you end up picking the fourth answer choice—even though that's the one you just don't know the definition of. That's okay! It’s still the right choice!
Now, occasionally, you might only know one or two of the words offered as answer choices. What do you do in that case? Well, this might be a situation where you can’t be sure you’re answering correctly—but you can still make a more intelligent guess than you would have if you hadn’t used my tried-and-true method.
Conclusion
So that, my friends, is my all-time favorite trick for answering sentence completions/vocab questions on the Digital SAT’s Reading and Writing section.
If you like this strategy and you want more where that came from, I have three forms of aid to offer you.
1) I created a totally free instructional video called The Three Mistakes that Most Students Make on the Digital SAT’s Reading and Writing Section…and How to Fix Them.
2) I conduct one-on-one SAT tutoring sessions—catered to your specific strengths and areas for improvement.
3) My online course The Ultimate Reading and Writing Guide for the Digital SAT is a totally self-paced digital course that also includes a grammar ebook. It will teach you everything you need to know to ace all the Reading and Writing questions of the SAT.
