If you’re used to the ACT and SAT, some aspects of the CLT can be a little jarring. One of the most startling differences is the kind of literature that provides the basis of its Grammar and Writing section. Most of its passages are drawn from its bank of classic literature, which can be quite a bit more colorful than the more sterile readings that provide the backbone of the ACT and SAT.
Picture it.
You’re sitting for the CLT. You open the Grammar/Writing section, and suddenly you see something that looks like this:
Even as “classical” authors go, Aristotle is not an easy writer. For many test takers, this kind of text can be a little stunning. (And that is partly deliberate. The CLT wants to reward students who have been regularly exposed to this kind of difficult, classic literature.)
But particularly in this section, you shouldn’t be distracted by any literary fireworks. Aristotle may be hard, but you don’t need a doctorate in Greek philosophy to answer these questions.
Here’s the thing: whatever the author that is providing the baseline passage, grammar is still grammar; those rules don’t change.
Look again at the anchor for Question 12:
You don’t really need to comprehend Aristotle’s point here. As long as you understand the grammar and syntax of the sentence, you have everything you need to answer this question. In fact, even if you can spot the three words “others is products,” you can identify what’s wrong with this sentence and are halfway to finding the right answer.
Many Grammar questions are like this. They simply require you to zero in on a much smaller portion of the text and apply a standard grammatical rule, in this example, subject-verb agreement.
Writing questions sometimes ask you to follow a longer flow or train of thought. It is about the most expansive kind of question the Grammar/Writing section will ask you. Even so, it still won’t really require that you comprehend the deeper point of the passage; it’s more about how the different sentences fit together.
So look at the anchor for Question 20:
The writer is considering deleting the underlined portion. Should the writer make this deletion?
A) Yes, because it shifts the discussion into political theory, a subject the passage has not otherwise raised.
B) Yes, because it only restates a point the passage already made — that politics is the master art.
C) No, because it extends and completes the passage’s own reasoning by applying “the good for man” to the distinction between an individual’s ends and a state’s ends.
D) No, because without it the passage’s definition of “the good” would be grammatically incomplete.
The correct answer is C), because it completes the larger point of the passage.
To get Question 20 right, a student never has to reconstruct what Aristotle is actually arguing across the whole passage. We need something much narrower: does this final sentence say anything the paragraph hasn’t already said?
Answering that means glancing back at the two or three sentences immediately before it and noticing that the passage already established politics as the master art governing individual and civic life. Does the closing sentence merely repeat that or does it add something new to it?
It happens to add something new, the individual/state distinction, so it stays. This is the process: compare clause to neighboring clause, then check for redundancy versus advancement. It’s continuity-checking, not interpretation. And again, most questions in Grammar/Reading will not even require this much reading.
The bottom line is that the content is not the key to this exercise: it is knowing the conventions of grammar and the common sense of composition. Even if you have never read much Aristotle or other classical authors, you can still put yourself in a solid position to excel at the CLT.
