<p>I made an 800 on the March SAT I Writing section. Here are three tips that really helped me and I believe will help anyone taking the test. First and foremost use a personal example if at all possible on the essay. The instructions give you four options: "your reading, studies, experience, or observations." Of the four, personal experience is the best. Although many teachers and test prep agencies are saying that you must have literary or historic examples they are wrong. Our after-school teacher emphasized using personal examples and he was right on the money. I scored a 12 as did many of the students he trained. Second, when answering the "fix the sentence questions" always start with the shortest answers. Working from shortest to longest saves time and you will be surprised how many times the shortest or second shortest choices are the answers!</p>
<p>One study discovered a sobering trend within the essay grades, there was an 80% correlation between length and score, additionally you can make things up for examples and the graders will not take off, ie. you could say that Shakesphere died in 1992 and no points would be taken off (this is just an example of course).</p>
<p>I got a 790...not an 800, but good enough for me. BAsically, all i did was look over a few grammar notes (look at misplaced modifiers especially!). I've never been all that strong in grammar, so that helped. Also, this is really cheap, but i had some ideas of what to use before hand. Like, the book To Kill a Mockingbird can be applied to practically any topic. Just think of things like that, that you can use for almost any topic. Good Luck!</p>
<p>Thanks for the suggestions. Hyper2400, I don't think that curve is correct. I missed 5 MC and yet still received a 730, so I think the curve is more generous than that.</p>
<p>Looking at the Q&A packet I received, out of the 5 errors I made, 4 are for sentence error ID questions, and 1 is for improving paragraph. Out of the 4 ID questions, one error was a really silly adverb/adjective error I made, that I now realize is blatantly obvious. The other three, however, my answers were simply wrong. Two of them were idiomatic errors. I thought "a tendency of changing" and "condemn to be" were idiomatically correct, turned out they were not. I think there may be a trend here...</p>
<p>Yeah the curve will vary based on essay score I think</p>
<p>hyper where did u find that?</p>