Hidden in Plain Sight: The Rhetorical Clues Your Teen Can't Afford to Miss on SAT® Reading

Plus: A summer prep package deal parents can't afford to miss!

A funny thing happened at my friend's dinner party last weekend...

His 16-year-old son was talking about watching The Sixth Sense for the first time.

"It was such a shocker! I couldn’t believe Bruce Willis was dead the entire time! That ending came out of nowhere!"

His mom looked at him like he'd just landed from Mars. "What are you talking about? The movie practically beat you over the head with clues!"

The kid looked genuinely confused. "Like what?"

"He never talks to anyone except the little boy. No one else acknowledges him. He wears the same clothes every day. He can't move physical objects when others are around," his dad chimed in. "How did you miss ALL of that?"

"Uhh… I guess I wasn't connecting those parts..."

I bit my tongue.

Every fiber of my SAT tutor being wanted to jump in with, "You know, this is a PERFECT metaphor for what happens with rhetorical function answer choices on the SAT!”

But even I know better than to ruin a good dinner party with unsolicited test prep advice.

So I just nodded and sipped my drink.

But heading home later, I couldn't stop thinking about it...

It was true. This is EXACTLY what happens to students on SAT Reading.

They focus so hard on individual details and facts that they completely miss the relationships between those details. The logical connections. The rhetorical function.

Speaking of which…

I just today finished creating a new unit for my SAT® Reading & Writing Mastery Course on this exact problem. It's all about "Rhetorical Description" - when answer choices make claims about the subtle ways that passages connect ideas through relationships like:

• Cause/effect

• Problem/solution

• Assertion/rebuttal

• Concept/contrast

• Idea/example

Many students get blindsided by questions that turn on these relationships. While they may see the “dots,” they fail to make the connections.

Here's what I've found after 10+ years of teaching SAT prep:

The students who score 700+ don't merely process the elements of a passage as distinct units. They understand how the different parts relate to each other. They see the connective tissue. They connect the dots.

Meanwhile, students who struggle are often like my friend's son watching The Sixth Sense - they might absorb some individual scenes, but they miss the relationships that make everything hang together.

The good news? This skill is 100% learnable.

In fact, it's one of the most teachable aspects of SAT Reading, especially because these relationships follow predictable patterns that appear over and over on every test.

Speaking of improving on SAT Reading and Writing…

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Practice Questions

Today I'm sharing two practice questions that specifically test your ability to identify relationships between elements in a passage:

• A Function Question (free for all subscribers below)

• A Words in Context Question (for paid subscribers, along with comprehensive strategy walk-throughs and detailed answer explanations for both questions)

These questions perfectly illustrate how relationship recognition can be the difference between confusion and confidence on test day.

Quick Tip 💡

When reading, take some time to focus on identifying different elements of the text and noting how they relate to each other. Look for common pairings such as claim/example, concept/contrast, and general idea/elaboration. Over time, this simple habit can dramatically improve your performance on SAT Function, Main Purpose, and Cross-Text Connection questions.

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Practice Question 1: Function

Geologists are confident that Mount Vesuvius will eventually experience a major eruption, given its history of volcanic activity and current geological conditions. They are much less confident, however, about predicting the timing of such an eruption, since that depends on internal magma chamber dynamics that remain largely unknown. Volcanologist Dr. Maria Santos and colleagues recently investigated whether seismic monitoring could be used to determine the state of the underground magma chamber but concluded that this approach could not sufficiently reveal the internal volcanic processes to allow eruption timing to be accurately predicted.

Which choice best describes the function of the bold sentence in the overall structure of the text?

A. It describes a significant limitation of the method used by Santos and colleagues.

B. It presents the central conclusion reached by Santos and colleagues.

C. It identifies the problem Santos and colleagues attempted to solve but could not.

D. It explains how the research of Santos and colleagues was evaluated by other volcanologists.

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Additional Practice Questions, Strategy Walk-Throughs, and Answer Explanations