American or British English?

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

<p>Hello!</p>

<p>I am currently a high school student in Australia, and I will be sitting the SAT in July. on the essay section, I was wondering whether I should bother to learn American English, or whether I could stick with Australian (British) English?</p>

<p>i.e. colour vs color
grey vs gray
aeroplane vs airplane
favourite vs favorite
monologue vs monolog
programme vs program
aluminium vs aluminum</p>

<p>Another big one is past participles of verbs. In our English, we use -ed and -t regularly, I understand in AmE, -ed is MUCH more common.
i.e. dreamt vs dreamed (to dream)
lit vs lighted (to light)
fit vs fitted (to fit)
learnt vs learned (to learn)
I tend to lean towards the -t more.</p>

<p>Will I have marks taken off for using these spellings? Should I learn the intricacies of AmE?</p>

<p>Thank you very much,
Charlie</p>

2

<p>Best to try to stick to the American spellings, alternate spellings would probably be viewed as errors.</p>

3

<p>Hi! In my experience, British spellings are absolutely fine and you can still get a high essay score. I think that the graders are aware of the syntactical differences. Moreover, don’t forgot that they must read quite a few “British” essays when marking the SATs.</p>

4

<p>Graders are supposed to look past spelling errors, so even if it wasn’t clear to one that you’re spelling a word the British way (as another poster pointed out…probably not that uncommon) he or she shouldn’t hold it against you.</p>

5

<p>Okay! Thanks, guys!</p>