Keeping it Simple

Whether it’s classwork or SAT practice, it often helps to find a similar but simpler problem when you’re faced with a question that feels challenging. This applies whether you’re the student, the parent, or the teacher. Given a giant word problem? Try to simplify it to be about something you know and can picture. Writing a complex sentence? Think of a simpler sentence to be sure your grammar and punctuation are correct. This allows you to use skills you already have to approach a more difficult problem. 

As any of my students can tell you, I often use shopping at the grocery store in my simplified examples. Why? Because it’s concrete, simple, and something I understand! Take the following sentence (a not-so-impressive Hannah Sieber original) as an example:

The author determined that like her brother and her cousin, she enjoyed reading literature on the beach.  

We are here trying to decide if that comma is in the right spot and/or if there should be others. This could be on the SAT, or it could be an essay for your class. The grammar and punctuation are the same! Let’s say we’re stuck; reading the sentence aloud makes me think something is wrong, but I’m not sure what. Let’s simplify the sentence, while keeping it similar.

I determined that like apples and oranges, grapes are sweet. 

You can see that the structure of these sentences is quite similar, and I used the same comma placement in my new sentence. This new example makes it easy to see something I always teach students about punctuation: when you interject something into a full sentence to add detail and the sentence would still be a complete sentence if the detail were removed, you need commas on both sides of that interjected segment. In this case, “like apples and oranges” is an added detail that gives us more context. “I determined that grapes are sweet” is a full sentence, which can stand alone. Therefore, we need commas on both sides of the inserted words, meaning we need to add a comma before the word “like”. 

Now we can go back to the real sentence we were correcting. Just like in our simplified sentence, we are left with a full sentence if we remove “like her brother and her cousin”, so we need commas on each side of that portion, like bookends. When you write it correctly, you can tell that your pauses at the commas help separate the interjected portion from the rest of the sentence. The corrected sentence would be: 

The author determined that, like her brother and her cousin, she enjoyed reading literature on the beach.  

The same strategy can work for math word problems, reading complex passages, etc. Keep things simple and apply what you already know!