McGraw-Hill's Conquering the New SAT Writing

by Christopher Black

Offers expert instruction for grammar mastery and winning essays. This title takes you through the step-by-step process of answering grammar questions and writing a high-scoring essay on the SAT. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071460764
• ISBN13: 9780071460767
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.4" x 11.2"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding

I was very impressed with the clarity, organization and helpfulness of this book. I learned more in one week about persuasive writing and grammar from this book than I did from 10 years of English classes, and I've been going to a supposedly "top tier" school all my life. Seriously--this should be a required textbook in every high school English class; I am even bringing it to college with me! This book was worth every cent I paid for it and more. Not only did my SAT Writing score improve by 160 points, but now I'm finding grammatical errors in almost everything I read! :)

This book WORKS!

I was really nervous about the new writing part of the SAT so I bought six review books: this one, and ones from Barron's, Princeton Review, Kaplan, REA and Rocket Review. Some of them have their good points, but one-the slickest, and supposedly the "ultimate"-is shallow and concerned mainly with promoting its author, and some are surprisingly poorly written-not encouraging for a writing textbook! "Conquering the SAT Writing" was the only one I used for more than one sitting; the others I skimmed and put back on the shelf. The great thing about this book is its systematic approach. You take a practice test, then a very comprehensive answer key shows you which lessons in the book to review to hammer home some point about grammar or writing strategy. It works really well. It is also extremely clear, concise and well-written. My PSAT writing score was a 560, which I was very unhappy with, but then I used this book for a few weeks (and worked with a tutor for the essay who also used this book) and brought my score up to a 740 on the SAT writing, and got a 12 on the essay. Now I'm thinking about using "McGraw-Hill's SAT", which I just bought, to help me with the math and reading for the next go around, because it uses a similar kind of approach. It helps, also, to take at least 3-4 real practice SATs as part of your prep.