Karl, et. al. 
     I haven't looked at the SAT in  a year or so but I think I remember questions about the most felicitous choice (not just error.) Has that changed?
    One problem with calling this sentence "awkward" is that we have taken it out of its discourse context. In this form , the fact that Beth outperforms her sisters in games is placed in the main clause AND in sentence ending prominence.  The fact that we are told that  they practice equally hard seems to me to show the author is setting this up to declare a different reason for Beth's game performance, perhaps greater talent or grittiness or heart.  The sentence seems very reasonably structured for those purposes. It's very common in journalism and academic writing to start with  attribution. What follows has a somewhat independent syntax (almost like a projected clause in a direct quote.) "Their high school coach said, "Although Beth and her sisters practice equally hard, Beth outperforms them in games."In that form, I don'rt think it would raise an eyebrow.
    My main problem with the SAT's is that they purport to test knowledge about language, but are afraid to do so directly. It seems to me that most high school students wouldn't understand the dynamics of this sentence sufficiently well enough to have a conversation about it. John's students may be an exception. For the most part, the SAT asks for intuitive decisions.
    If you are directly teaching grammar and want to test for that, you would ask very different kinds of questions. In the current environment, very few students would do well.

Craig


________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Karl Hagen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 1:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SAT question

I'm going to defend the SAT here, on several levels. First, I agree with the SAT writers. There's no error in this sentence. In terms of pedagogy, I see several issues:

1. Your students have an overly simplistic notion of modification. I doubt they really believe that modifiers always must modify what comes immediately to their left. Perhaps they are over-generalizing from instances of so-called squinting modifiers, where the modifier might apply either to the clause to the left or to the one to the right. Merely being adjacent to something, however, doesn't necessarily create an ambiguity. There needs to be a plausible semantic situation where the modification could make sense, and in this case, there isn't one. I often notice students who have been taught about grammatical ambiguity tend to over-generalize and tend to claim ambiguity based on mere proximity rather than any sensible interpretive issue.

2. Your students are focused on a single word, "although" and saying that it's misplaced, but if, hypothetically, we accept this as an error, it's the entire subordinate clause that would be misplaced, not a single word. On a purely pragmatic level of SAT strategy, this CANNOT be the error, as the rules of the game clearly state that any error will be entirely confined to the underlined choice, meaning that there must exist a fix for the problem that can be executed only by changing that one part. Moving the whole clause is disallowed under the rules of the game. More importantly, that your students are focused on the word shows they are thinking of grammatical relationships only on the level of individual words, but it's very important to stress that many relationships exist at higher levels--phrases and clauses. Grammar is not a one-word-at-a-time affair.

3. It may be fair to call opening with two modifiers that have different "ranks," as Bruce puts it awkward, but I want to defend its inclusion here, both pedagogically as a subject for in-class discussion, and as an appropriate structure of a high-stakes test.

The task in this section is error identification, not stylistic judgment. If we identify the sentence as awkward, so what? Awkward according to whose lights? It's not how I would normally write, but that's not a sufficient criterion for rejecting the sentences inclusion on a test. There is a fine line (and perhaps a slippery slope too) when we start rejecting sentences like this for awkwardness. Academic authors do use this sort of opening reasonably often. We might not consider it ideal, but if we reject it, what do we say to students who find, say putting a that-clause in a subject to be awkward? (Few of them write such clauses--they much prefer the extraposed version.) It's easy to reject constructions you're not used to as awkward, and do we really want students to use "it sounds funny to me" as a criterion for correctness?

Given that we're asking students to look for grammatical errors,  it's important that students be able to parse complex, highly embedded syntax to say, "there is no error here." So rather than talk about awkwardness and condemn the SAT makers for being bad writers, I prefer to say that this sort of double left-branching opening imposes a significantly heavier interpretive burden on readers than a more simply constructed sentence, and that is a good thing for a test. We want some test items that will distinguish students who can deal with complex syntax from those who cannot.

I'm not arguing here for the appropriateness of the writing section as a whole. But given it's inclusion, I think that such syntax is appropriate in some questions.

Karl

On Dec 20, 2011, at 6:30 AM, John Chorazy wrote:

>
> Good morning... Your opinions of the SAT and its methods may vary, but I'd like to ask your thoughts on this particular question:
>
> According to (a ) their high school basketball coach, (b ) although Beth and her sisters worked
>
> equally hard in practice, Beth (c ) tended to outperform them both (d ) during games. (e) No error
>
> My11th graders decided that b is the correct answer with the following logic - the relationship between the clauses "Beth and her sisters worked equally hard in practice" and "Beth tended to outperform them both during games" should established by "although" between them. However, "although" is misplaced since "According to their high school basketball coach" doesn't modify "although Beth and her sisters worked equally hard in practice". I can see how both clauses might work to modify "Beth tended to outperform them both during games," but it's an awkward sentence. Maybe not necessarily grammatically flawed, but awkward.
> SAT suggests that (e), no error, is the correct answer. My students disagree. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments.
> Thanks as always...
>
> John
>
>
>
> --
> John Chorazy
> English III Honors and Academic
> Pequannock Township High School
> 973.616.6000
>
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