I feel compelled to say this as loudly as I possibly can:

The Ultimate SAT Verbal blog is hands down, T H E most E X T E N S I V E, accurate, and helpful SAT Writing and Critical Reading advice that I have been able to locate.  Bar none (and I've spent the better part of the last 6 months searching high and low).

If you are facing the SAT in the next year or two, as a student or a parent, do not pass GO until you have read every single word on this site.  And please don't bypass the archives (treasure trove).

There is so much worth noting on this site, I hardly know where to begin, but I will start with the Page for Tutors (which really should be titled: The Page for Tutors and Everyone Else).

On whether or not it's really possible to raise your score:

Despite the statistics that the College Board regularly trots out showing that tutoring does little to increase students' SAT scores, it is perfectly possible to help a student raise his or her score by hundreds of points...

...One of the most dangerous things the test-prep industry has done is to perpetuate the idea that correct answers on standardized tests are somehow unrelated to their questions......

.....Simply teaching students to eliminate answers will only get them so far; if you want to produce dramatic score increases, you need to teach them to answer questions for real. In other words, you need to work on their actual reasoning skills.

On disappointing results after test prep:

...Students who are consistently unable to identify the tone and main point of a passage need to learn how to identify the tone and main point of a passage before they do anything else. Without that ability, all the strategy in the world might not get their score to budge a point. This is, by the way, a very common issue for kids who have been disappointed by major test-prep companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review, which deal primarily with strategy and pretty much ignore the underlying skills.

On prepping with "unofficial" College Board material:

While some of the commercially produced guides may come close to the real thing on occasion, on many other occasions they just don't. This is particularly true for Writing; only a handful of the errors that show up on the actual test appear in most guides, and many errors that do not appear on the actual test do show up. In addition, the hard questions tend to be hard for the wrong reasons (this is particularly true for Barron's). The SAT may be tricky, but the answers on the real thing are not arbitrary.

As for reading, there are two major faults: first, many of the passages are simply too straightforward. Real SAT passages present arguments and count-arguments, not always in the most straightforward manner; "fake" ones tend to have too obvious a focus. The SAT is a reasoning test, not a literature test, and there needs to be a degree of subtlety in order to force students to employee a reasoning process.

I'll leave you with one last thought: Worried about Critical Reading?  Read this post.

To be continued.....

Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis