SAT prep books

Wed Jul 2 00:11:26 UTC 2003

[this first bit, in square brackets, is personal background to the
discussion that follows.  if you just want to hear about two
preparation books for the SAT, skip this first bit.

i spent the weekend on a mini-vacation in santa cruz, courtesy of
barbara scholz and geoff pullum.  we ate, read, slept, and took long
walks, in alternation.  wonderful.  saturday night we ate out, at an
afghan restaurant.  which happened to be next to a used book store, so
of course we all had to go in and root around.  the Reference section
had two different preparation manuals for the writing section of the
PSAT II, one copy of each.  after a bit of tussling, geoff and i each
bought one, and then we spent some time searching through the grammar
pronouncements and the sample exams, occasionally emitting cries of
horrified exultation and quoting stuff at one another.  barbara (who's
a philosopher) enjoyed the scene enormously - linguists entertaining
themselves on vacation!

anyway, i took one of the manuals (ehrenhaft) home to palo alto with
me, and left the other (conner & hixon) with geoff, so i have more to
say right now about the former than the latter.]

        The two prep manuals I'll call "Best" and "Barron's" in what
follows.  They are:

  Ellen Davis Conner & Mamie Webb Hixon.  1998.  The Best Test
    Preparation for the SAT II Subject Test in Writing.  (Apparently)
    3rd ed.  Piscataway NJ: Research and Education Association.

  George Ehrenhaft.  1998.  Barron's How to Prepare for the SAT II
    Writing.  2nd ed.  Hauppauge NY: Barron's.

They're generally arranged in the same way, with sections of advice on
grammar, diction, essay writing, essay organization, etc. and with
sample SAT exams, complete with answer keys and explanations of the
answers.

        But they differ, sometimes in startling ways.  Take the matter
of stranded prepositions.  Barron's doesn't mention them.  There's no
proscription in the grammar sections, and they play no role in the
exam questions that test grammar, Sentence Errors and Improving
Sentences.  That's good.

        Best, on the other hand, rigidly declares them to be
unacceptable and tests this proscription in a number of exam
questions, in each case requiring that the student "correct" a perfect
good English sentence to something that is at best awkward, sometimes
barely acceptable at all.

        I think this is scandalous, in several ways.  To start with,
it is scandalous to have such presumably authoritative publications
differ on fundamental matters of fact.  It's as if chemistry prep
manuals differed on the atomic number of iridium, or if math prep
manuals gave wildly different values for pi, or if literature prep
manuals assigned the authorship of Crime and Punishment to two
different writers.  That's just outrageous, and it's injurious to
students.

        And then, of course, in this case, one of the manuals is right
(in its silence) and the other is just wrong.  It's as if one lit
manual said that Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment and the other
said that Tolstoy did.  What's at issue is not some subtle difference
in interpretation, or some arcane dispute among scholars (who may
legitimately disagree blah blah blah), but a fact about established
formal standard written English, for centuries now.

        As a teacher, as a parent, and as a scholar, I'm offended by
the appearance of a blanket proscription against stranded prepositions
in an SAT prep manual.

        But enough of stranded prepositions.  Let's get back to
possessive antecedents for pronouns.  This time, *both* manuals get it
wrong.

        Best has one of those ultra-obscure formulations of the
Possessive Antecedent Proscription. "Pronoun reference problems
occur", it says on p. 50, providing a list of circumstances that ends
with "when a noun or pronoun has no expressed antecedent", giving
(yes!) a classic in-Mary's-book example:

  INCORRECT: In the President's address to the union, he promised
    no more taxes.
  CORRECT: In his address to the union, the President promised no
    more taxes.

Lord only knows what the student is supposed to make of all this.

        I chose not to see how Best treats violations of the PAP in
its exam questions (I did this for Barron's, though; just wait).
Instead, I looked for violations of the PAP in Best's own texts, when
the authors weren't thinking about it.  In the very first sample test,
in a section where the student is asked to choose among possible
rewritings of underlined material (including answer (A), which
involves no change), on p. 129 we find:

  47.  _Ringing loudly, Doug's girlfriend called him on the telephone
    to insist_  he come over right away.

This is obviously about the dangling modifier, but meanwhile the
sentence contains a straightforward violation of the PAP, in
"Doug's girlfriend... he..."  And, yes, this violation is preserved
in the rewriting marked as correct:

  (E)  _The telephone rang loudly, and Doug's girlfriend was calling
    to insist_  he come over right away.

(I myself would have preferred something like "The telephone rang
loudly; it was Doug's girlfriend calling to insist he come over right
away", rather than coordination with "and", but no such alternative
was offered.)

        Doubtless there are more PAP violations like this in Best.
One, in the very first sample test, ought to be enough, though.

        Barron's gives a version of the PAP that can be applied fairly
easily (and is, in the sample tests, repeatedly).  In the section on
"implied reference", on p. 186, Barron's declares firmly:

  Pronouns are often mistakenly used to refer to a possessive.

with, once again, an in-Mary's-book (bad) example:

  In Ken Kesey's novel _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_, _he_
  describes life in a mental ward.

and a classic Implicitness explanation, which has the wonderfully
baffling subtlety of its type:

    The pronoun _he_ obviously refers to Kesey, but the word Kesey
  does not appear in the sentence, and Kesey's, a possessive noun, is
  not a viable substitute.  Therefore, the sentence must be rewritten.

    In the novel _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_, the author,
    Ken Kesey, describes life in a mental ward.

(Feinschmecker that I am, I would have preferred "the word _Kesey_"
and "_Kesey's_, a possessive noun", or a version with some kind of
quotation marks.  Don't these people know about use vs. mention?)

        Barron's really really means this proscription.  It cares
about the PAP so much that of the 30 "Identifying Sentence Errors"
questions in each sample example, an average of one per exam is a PAP
error.  Here's the tally:

  Practice Test A: #55.
  Practice Test B: #10 and #55.
  Practice Test C: none.
  Practice Test D: #6.
  Practice Test E: #9.

The putative violations are all over the PAP map.  There's the
in-Mary's-book type:

  B, #55.  In all of _Carson McCullers'_ (A) stories, _she_ (B)
    probes... (p. 304)
  Answer key: 55. B  Pronoun reference.  The pronoun _she_ cannot
    refer to a possessive noun.  (p. 312)

There's the Mary's-father type:

  A, #55.  Henry's heroism _was demonstrated_ (A) after _he_ (B_ had
    been wounded in battle... (p. 279)
  Answer key: 55. B  Pronoun reference.  The pronoun _he_ should
    not be used to refer to a possessive noun.

There's even a Mary's-father type in which the pronoun is itself
possessive, a type freely allowed in many handbooks:

  B, #10.  Chekhov's eye _for detail_ (A) and use of cogent language
    _make_ (B) _his_ (C) short stories and plays popular the world
    over... (p. 296)
  Answer key: 10.  C  Pronoun reference.  The pronoun _his_ cannot
    be used to refer to a possessive noun.

(Notice the slight variations on the formula: "cannot refer to",
"should not be used to refer to", and "cannot be used to refer to".)

        Ah, but this is when Ehrenhaft (or, more likely, his staff) has
his eyes firmly focused on possessive antecedents for pronouns.  Once
his attention is elsewhere, he produces PAP violations himself.  In an
early "Improving Sentences" question, part of a self-assessment test
before Barron's gets into actual sample SAT exams, we see (p. 39):

  24.  The book's descriptions of the country and the town, along with
    its recent release as a movie,  _explains its sudden increase in
    sales_  in bookstores nationally.

("Explain its sudden increase in sales" is the correct rewriting, by
the way.)  So we have "the book's... its... its..."

        Even better, once Barron's gets into extended analysis of
particular essays, in the section on "how to write an essay in 20
minutes", the occasional possessive antecedent for a pronoun appears:

  Each of Pat's false starts consumed less than a minute of her
    prewriting time.  She then realized that much of her knowledge
    of democracy was acquired in history courses.  So, she decided...
    (p. 69)

  Sometimes a better thesis suddenly swims into the writers' view
    half way through the test.  Should they change course or stick
    with what they have?  (p. 71)

(This second example has an interestingly awkward plural "the
writers'".  I suspect that Ehrenhaft wanted to write a generic
singular "the writer's", but then was faced with a choice between
inappropriately masculine "his", singular "they", and the disjunction
"he or she" - occurring twice - and tried to fix it by making the
antecedent plural.  Not a completely felicitous move, in my opinion.)

        Do as I say, not as I do.  Rarely good advice.

        Well, I no longer have to wonder if high school students are
being taught the PAP.  Even if they don't get it in English class
(which probably has very little grammar instruction in it, anyway),
it's right there in the practice materials for the SAT that commercial
firms - not ETS - put out.  Shame on them.