The key terms and core concepts behind every SAT Reading & Writing question. Organized by the four official College Board domains, with student-friendly definitions you can actually remember.
These questions test what a passage states or directly implies. You will need to identify central ideas, choose the textual or quantitative evidence that best supports a claim, and draw modest inferences that stay grounded in the text. Always defend your answer with specific words from the passage.
This is the largest domain on the section. It tests vocabulary in context, how a passage is organized, the function of specific sentences, and how two short passages compare. The SAT does not test rare words. It tests common words used in tricky ways, so context matters more than memorization.
These questions test how well you can revise writing for clarity, concision, and a stated goal. Two main question types appear: transitions (picking the word that names the right logical link) and rhetorical synthesis (picking the sentence that best accomplishes a goal using a set of bullet-point notes).
Pure grammar and punctuation. This is the most concrete domain on the section. The rules are learnable and the answers are unambiguous. Strong grammar study often produces the biggest score gains in the shortest time. Most questions reduce to one core skill: deciding whether each side of a punctuation mark is a complete sentence.