<li><p>Subject-verb agreement when subject follows verb (Despite an intensive campaign to encourage conversation, there is many Americans who have not accepted recycling as a way of life.)</p></li>
<li><p>Subject-verb agreement when subject and verb are separated. (The collection of paintings entitled “Clammy Clam clams” are one of the most widely traveled exhibits in recent years.)</p></li>
<li><p>Subjet-verb agreement when the subject seems plural. (Poor pitching, along with injuries and defensive lapses, are among the problems that plague last year’s championship team) Keep in mind that the subject is pitching, not injuries/lapses.</p></li>
<li><p>Confusion of simple and past participles. (Several passerby seen the bank robber leaving the scene of his crime.) swam and had swum, sang and had sung, shrank and had shrunk, etc. Remember stuff like that.</p></li>
<li><p>Confusion of infinitive and gerund. (Team officials heralded Cap Day as an attempt at attracting a larger tunrout of fans). The answer would be ‘to attract’, idiom and your ability to ‘hear’ the error plays a role here.</p></li>
<li><p>Non-Idiomatic Preposition After Verb (City Council members frequently meet until the early morning hours in order to work in their stalemates). The answer would be ‘work out’ or ‘work through’.</p></li>
<li><p>Wrong word (affect/effect, emigrate/immigrate, eminent/imminent)</p></li>
<li><p>Wrong Tense (Over the last half-century, the building of passenger airliners had grown into a multi-billion dollar industry). The answer would be has grown, watch out for when a time indicator, such as Middle Ages, is involved in the sentence.</p></li>
<li><p>Number Agreement Problems (The advertisement in the newspaper requested that only persons with a high school diploma apply for the position). Here, it is assumed that all persons share a single diploma. The correct answer would be ‘with high school diplomas’ here.</p></li>
<li><p>Pronoun in the wrong number (Most infants, even unusually quiet ones, will cry with greater intensity when it begins teething).</p></li>
<li><p>Pronoun in the wrong case in compound noun prhases (Him and the rest of the team stopped by the malt shop for milkshapes after the game). Just separate the rest of the clause by taking out ‘and the rest of the team’ to see if it would make sense. Him stopped by the malt shop for milkshakes after the game . . . doesn’t make sense. It should be ‘he’.</p></li>
<li><p>Pronoun Shift (One cannot sleep soundlyi f you exercise vigorously before retiring to bed.)</p></li>
<li><p>Pronoun with Ambiguous references (After the dreailment last month, they are inspecting trains for safety more often than ever before.) Who is ‘they’?</p></li>
<li><p>Faulty comparison (To lash back at one’s adcversaries is a less courageous course than attempting to bring about reconciliation with them.) In order to keep this comparison parallel it should be ‘to attempt’.</p></li>
<li><p>Misuse of adjective or adverb (The critics who reviewed both of David Eggers’s novels like the second one best). Only two are compared, it should be ‘better’. (The applicants for low-interest loans hoped to buy decent built houses for their families.) ‘Decently’ would be the proper word.</p></li>
<li><p>Double negative (James easily passed the biology exam without hardly studying his lab notes). Hardly and without both describe a scarcity/lack, only one is necessary. ‘Don’t not’ would be a more basic example. Don’t use no double negatives on the Writing Section.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Can someone comprehensively yet concisely summarize complex tense use (as not did, have done, had done) and when each of those can and cannot be used?</p>
<p>Can someone also go over which tenses can be used when given a context clue referring to the past, such as The Middle Ages. If it just states Middle Ages, which kinds of past tenses (did, have done, had done) can be used, and if it says during the Middle Ages, can present be used? Can future ever be used or can it be used only if future perfect.</p>
<p>Can someone also go over used of the words "would" and "as" (when are they correctly used and when are they incorrectly used?) along with parallelism with both..and (is something like both in China and Italy not correct since in needs to be before Italy for parallelism?)</p>
<p>Also, a confusing example:
[Something of] a phenomenon [in] the entertainment world, political satirists...[No Error]</p>
<p>I put that Something of was incorrect but it was no error. I'm confused; I thought something of doesn't agree in number with "political satirists." I thought that it was wrong since something is singular and satirists is plural. Explanation?</p>
<p>If it says "during the Middle Ages," you know it's in the past, so present tense cannot be used-- it must be past tense.</p>
<p>For the example... how could "Something of..." be plural? You can't say "somethings." To flip the sentence around, you'd say "Political satirists are something of a phenomenon..." and that sounds fine.</p>
<ol>
<li>Subject-verb agreement when the subject seems plural. (Poor pitching, along with injuries and defensive lapses, are among the problems that plague last year's championship team) Keep in mind that the subject is pitching, not injuries/lapses.
Wouldn't the subject be "Poor pitching, along with injuries and defensive lapses"?
Why is that any different from "Poor pitching, injuries and defensive lapses", which would be plural and not singular as you suggest.</li>
</ol>
<p>@looseseal--great name. i was devastated when they didn't bring that show back.</p>
<p>@silver--the basic explanation of the difference is that an adverbial phrase like "along with X" can be lifted from its position in a sentence and put anywhere else. that's why it's surrounded by commas--the commas show that the phrase they're around is separate from the rest of the sentence.</p>
<p>the sentence could also have been written like this:</p>
<p>Poor pitching is among the problems that plague last year's championship team, along with injuries and defensive lapses.</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>Along with injuries and defensive lapses, poor pitching is among . . . [etc]</p>
<p>your second example, which used a series as a subject, would require a plural verb.</p>
<p>(that's not a very technical description, but you get the idea--the basic answer is that a series is different from a noun modified by a prepositional phrase.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
I have never seen confused words (like affect/effect) on the SAT.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>i think i have. but it could have been from a test that isnt from the blue book/qas. ive taken so many tests that they all run together. but im almost positive "eminent/imminent" has shown up on a real test before.</p>
<p>On the SAT, the use of "had" with a verb signals two events taking place in the sentence. The event that occurred first receives "had." Be on the lookout for sentences that use "had" twice in the same sentence. Example:</p>
<p>Incorrect: The girls *had *been waiting two hours by the time you *had *arrived.
Correct: The girls had been waiting two hours by the time you arrived. </p>
<p>Many sentences with the word "had" will use dates or time words as context clues. Any time "had" is underlined, you should check to make sure it is used correctly.</p>