- Cover the answer choices and guess your own word first. Then find the choice closest to your guess. This stops you from getting talked into a wrong answer that merely sounds sophisticated.
- Tone matters as much as meaning. A word can be a correct synonym and still be wrong if it's too formal, too casual, or too strong for the sentence's tone.
- Watch for words that sound advanced but are slightly off. The SAT likes to include a choice that's a "smart-sounding" near-miss specifically to catch students who pick the fanciest-sounding word instead of the most accurate one.
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SAT · Reading & Writing · Craft and Structure
SAT Craft and Structure: How and Why, Not Just What
The single biggest domain on Reading and Writing. It's not about what the passage says, it's about how and why it says it.
Craft and Structure is the largest of the four Reading and Writing domains. It shifts the question from "what happened in the passage" to "why did the author write it this way": word choice, structure, and how two texts relate to each other.
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Did you know
Craft and Structure makes up roughly 28% of the Reading and Writing section, more than any other domain. Getting genuinely comfortable with it moves your score more than any other single Reading and Writing skill.
What's tested
Words in context
Pick the word or phrase that best fits a blank, based on tone and meaning, not just dictionary definition.
Learn more: guessing the word before you see the choices
Text structure and purpose
Why did the author include a specific sentence, or how is the passage organized overall?
Learn more: naming the function of a sentence
- Ask "what job is this sentence doing", introducing a claim, giving an example, contradicting the previous point, summarizing? The correct answer names that job accurately.
- Purpose questions about the whole passage often follow a pattern: introduce a topic, complicate or narrow it, then resolve or conclude. Knowing this shape helps you spot which stage a given sentence belongs to.
- Wrong answers here often describe a real thing the sentence does but not its main job, for example, a sentence that gives an example is sometimes mislabeled as one that "refutes a claim." Match the primary function, not a side effect.
Cross-text connections
Two short passages on a related topic, how do the authors' views compare?
Learn more: summarizing each text before comparing
- Summarize each passage in one phrase before reading the question. Cross-text questions almost always boil down to "text 1 says X, text 2 says Y." Once you have both summaries, the answer choices sort themselves quickly.
- Watch for questions that ask how one author would respond to the other. These need you to apply passage 1's viewpoint to passage 2's specific claim, not just restate passage 1's general opinion.
- The two passages usually agree on the topic but differ on a specific point, emphasis, cause, or conclusion. Find that specific point of difference; it's almost always what the question is testing.
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Gotcha
On words-in-context questions, the most tempting wrong answer is often the most impressive-sounding word in the list. Test-makers know students associate "sounds smart" with "sounds correct." Go with precision over vocabulary flexing, the plainer word that fits exactly beats the fancier word that's slightly off.
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Quick tip
For structure-and-purpose questions, try reading the passage as if you're explaining it to a friend one sentence at a time: "first it says this, then it adds this, then it pushes back with this." That running narration is basically the answer to most purpose questions.
Reading about it is step one.
Ember has original Craft and Structure questions with the reasoning explained for every answer choice, not just the correct one.
Practice Craft and Structure now