How to Improve Your SAT Writing Score: 9 Key Strategies

Are you struggling with SAT Writing + Reading scores between 300 and 500? You're not alone—hundreds of thousands of students are scoring in this range, too. But many don't know the best ways to break out of this score range and score 600 or higher.

Here, we'll discuss how to improve your SAT Writing score effectively, and why it's so important to do so. Put these principles to work and I'm confident you'll be able to improve your score!

UPDATE: This article discusses a previous version of the SAT. If you are looking to raise your score on the digital SAT check out my guide to getting an 600 on SAT Reading and Writing.

Brief note: This article is for students scoring below 600 on Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (EBRW). Although this score is a combination of your Reading and Writing scores, in this article, I'm focusing exclusively on Writing. So when I talk about scoring a 600 on Writing, what I really mean is getting a Writing test score of 30.

If you're already scoring above 600, my articles on how to get a perfect SAT score and how to get a perfect SAT Writing score will be more appropriate for you. You can still read this article, though, as some of it might be helpful to you. By contrast, if your goal is a 500 (or a 25 test score on Writing), these concepts will still equally apply, so I encourage you to continue reading!

In this article, I'm going to discuss why scoring high is a good idea, explain what it takes to score a 600 on SAT Writing, and then go over key test-taking strategies.

Stick with me—this is like building a house. You need to lay a good foundation before you can put up the walls and pretty windows. Here, we need to understand why you're doing what you're doing before we can dive into tips and strategies.

Getting a 600 on SAT Writing: Understand the Stakes

Improving your low SAT Writing score to something in the 600 range will dramatically boost your chances of getting into better colleges.

Let's take a popular school, Penn State University, as an example. Its average SAT score is 1270. Its 25th percentile score is 1180, and 75th percentile is 1370. Furthermore, its acceptance rate is 51%. In other words, a little more than half of all applicants are admitted. But the lower your scores, the worse your chances will be of getting in.

Based on our analysis, if you score around 1180, your chances of admission to Penn State drop to 25%, or around 1/4 chance. But if you raise your SAT score to 1370, your chances of admission go up to 75%—that's a much higher chance of admission!

For the Writing section, this is especially true if you want to apply to humanities or language programs. These programs expect your SAT Writing score to be better than your Math score. So if you score low on this section, they'll likely doubt your ability to do college-level humanities work.

As you can see, it's really worth your time to improve your SAT score. Hour for hour, it's the best thing you can do to raise your chance of getting into college.

Know That You Can Raise Your SAT Writing Score

This isn't just some lame inspirational message you see on the back of a milk carton.

I mean, literally, you and every other student can do this.

At PrepScholar, I've worked with thousands of students scoring in the lower range of 300-500.

Time after time, I see students beat themselves up over their low scores who think improving them is impossible. "I know I'm not smart." "I've just never been good at writing, and I can't see myself scoring high." "I don't know what to study to improve my score."

It breaks my heart.

Because I know that, more than anything else, your SAT score is a reflection of how hard you work and how smartly you study. Not your IQ or your school grades. Not how Ms. Anderson in 9th grade gave you a C on your essay.

Here's why: the SAT is a weird test. When you take it, don't you get the sense that the questions are nothing like what you've seen in school?

You've learned grammar before in school. You know some basic grammar rules. But the SAT questions just seem so much weirder.

The test is purposely designed this way. The SAT can't test difficult concepts because this would be unfair to students who never took AP English. It can't ask you to dissect Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The SAT is a national test after all, which means it needs a level playing field for all students around the country.

As a result, the SAT has to test concepts that all high school students will learn. Subject-verb agreement, run-on sentences, pronoun choice, etc. You've learned all of this in school.

But the SAT still has to make the test difficult, so it tests these basic concepts in strange ways. This trips up students who don't prepare for it, but it rewards students who understand the test well.

Here's an example of an SAT Writing question, which requires you to find the grammar error in the sentence:

This is a classic SAT Writing question. Try to solve it before reading on.

The error here is in the subject/verb agreement. The subject of the sentence is "commissioner," which is singular. The verb, however, is "run," but because the subject is singular, it should really be "runs."

If you didn't see an error, you fell for a classic SAT Writing trap. It purposely confused you with the interrupting phrase, "along with his 20 staff members." You're now picturing 20 people in a campaign, which suggests a plural verb!

The SAT Writing section is full of questions like this one. Nearly every grammar rule is tested in a specific way, and if you don't prepare for these, you're going to do a lot worse than you should.

Here's the good news: this might have been confusing the first time, but the next time you see a question like this, you'll know exactly what to do: find the subject and the verb, and get rid of the interrupting phrase.

Essentially, to improve your SAT Writing score, you just need to do the following:

• Learn the grammar rules tested on the SAT

• Study how the SAT tests these grammar rules, and learn how to detect which grammar rule you need to know for a question

• Practice with a lot of realistic SAT Writing questions so you can learn from your mistakes

I'll go into more detail about exactly how to do all of this. But first, let's see how many questions you'll need to get correct on SAT Writing to get a 600 EBRW score.

What It Takes to Get a 600 (or 30) on SAT Writing

If we have a target score in mind, it helps to understand what you need to get that score on the actual test. Remember that we're aiming for a 600 EBRW score—or, more specifically, a Writing test score of 30, out of 40.

Scoring is a little complicated for SAT Writing. Unlike the Math section, which is scored on a scale of 200-600, Writing is combined with Reading to give you a single Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (EBRW) score. In order to get this scaled score, however, your Writing and Reading scores start out as raw scores (equal to the number of questions you got right). These are converted into test scores on a scale of 10-40. Finally, the two test scores are combined and converted to a single EBRW score on a scale of 200-600.

In this sense, when we talk about getting a 600 on SAT Writing, what we really mean is getting a 30 out of 40 on SAT Writing.

Note that if you opt for the SAT Essay, this score will not be included in your SAT Writing score (it used to be before 2016; now, it's a completely separate score).

If you could use a refresher on how the SAT is scored, read our in-depth guide to SAT scoring.

Here's a raw score to SAT Writing score conversion table from an official SAT practice test. Be aware that SAT conversion tables differ for each test, so they can't offer an exact conversion—just an estimate.

Source: Official SAT Practice Test #1

Notice that if you're aiming for a 30/40 on Writing, you need a raw score of 31-32, or around 77%. This means you need to correctly answer a bit above 3/4 of all questions.

Whatever you're scoring now, take note of the difference you need to get to a 30. For example, if you're scoring a 23, you'd need to answer 10-11 more questions right to get to a 600. Once again, if your goal is a 500 (or a 25 in Writing), the same analysis applies.

OK—so we've covered why getting a higher SAT Writing score is important, why you specifically are capable of improving your score, and the raw score you need to get to your target.

Now we'll actually get into actionable strategies that you should use in your own studying to maximize your score improvement.

How to Improve Your Low SAT Writing Score: 9 Strategies

Below, I introduce my top strategies to help you get the high SAT Writing score you deserve.

Strategy 1: Get Used to the SAT Writing Passage Format

The SAT Writing format consists of a passage on the left-hand side and questions on the right. The questions are indicated in the passage by underlines and number markers.

Take a look:

This format is a little odd to get used to since you need to alternate between reading the passage and answering questions about grammar and writing style. As some of the questions require you to understand the passage as a whole, it can get pretty tricky. And darting your head left and right to answer questions can ultimately make you lose concentration.

So in what order do you read the passage and answer the questions? We recommend this three-step strategy:

1. Read every sentence to completion. If the sentence has an underline in the middle, don't stop reading the sentence. Finish reading it so you understand what it's talking about.
2. Go back to the question and answer it.
3. If the question has multiple questions tagged, tackle them one at a time.

We find that this strategy works best for lower-scoring students. It strikes a good balance between comprehending the passage and answering questions quickly.

Do not read the entire passage and then answer the questions. It's usually not important to comprehend the entire passage as you need to do on Reading. Most questions are very focused sentence by sentence, meaning you don't need other sentences to answer them correctly.

You can read more about tackling SAT Writing passages here.

Strategy 2: Know What's Being Tested on SAT Writing

Now that you're comfortable with the SAT passage format, it's important to know what's actually being tested on this section. You know grammar skills are being tested, but which ones? Do you know what rhetoric/style skills are being tested as well?

When you go into battle, you need to know your enemy. Here's a great breakdown at a high level of what's tested on SAT Writing.

And here's a great listing of the top 12 SAT grammar rules you should know. I won't list them here since the article I linked to is a much better explanation. For more tips on SAT grammar, check out our guide to all essential grammar rules you should know.

All these skills bring us to my next strategy ...

Strategy 3: Learn the Most Important Grammar Rules and Ignore the Others

There's just no way around it. You need to know what the most important grammar rules are and how they work in order to do well on SAT Writing.

The good news is that certain grammar rules are far more common than others on the SAT. For example, punctuation is the #1 grammar rule on the test—and almost six times more common than modifiers!

Overall, there aren't that many grammar rules you need to master. In this sense, SAT Writing is a bit easier than SAT Math, for which there are more than a dozen unique skills you need to do well.

What this means is that you can get more bang for your buck if you study correctly. Instead of reading a grammar book cover to cover, you should focus on the most critical grammar rules to improve your score most.

We dissected every official SAT practice test available to figure out how many questions will appear for every skill. Here's an overview of what we found for SAT Writing:

This list isn't that useful without practice. Now that you know what to expect on SAT Writing, you need to practice the most common skills again and again. This will get you the biggest bang for your buck for every hour you spend studying. 

This is how I designed our PrepScholar SAT program to work. We customize your study program to your strengths and weaknesses, forcing you to spend study time on what is really going to improve your score. You don't have to find your own SAT practice questions or decide what to study in what order—we do all of that for you!

Strategy 4: Find Your Grammar Weaknesses and Drill Them

If you're like most students, you're better at some areas on SAT Writing than you are at others. You might know pronouns really well, for instance, but you're not very strong at sentence constructions and fragments. Or maybe you're really good at parallel construction but have no idea what a faulty modifier is.

You also don't have an unlimited amount of time to study. You have a lot of schoolwork, you might be an athlete or have intense extracurriculars, and you've got friends to hang out with. This means that for every hour you study for the SAT, it needs to be the most effective hour possible.

In concrete terms, you need to find your greatest areas of improvement and work on those.

Too many students study the "dumb" way. They just buy a prep book and read it cover to cover. When they don't improve their SAT scores, they're shocked.

I'm not.

Studying effectively for the SAT isn't like painting a house. You're not trying to cover your bases with a thin layer of understanding.

What these students did wrong was that they wasted time on subjects they already knew well—and didn't spend enough time improving their weak spots.

Studying effectively for the SAT is like plugging up the holes of a leaky boat. You need to find the biggest hole and fill it. Then you find the next biggest hole and fix that. Soon you'll find that your boat isn't sinking at all.

How does this relate to SAT Writing? You need to pinpoint the grammar rules you're having most trouble with and then do enough practice questions until they're no longer a weakness. Fixing up the biggest holes.

For every Writing question you miss, you have to identify the type of question it is and why you missed it. Once you notice patterns to the questions you miss, you can find extra practice for particular grammar rules that are difficult for you.

Say you miss a lot of questions related to commas (a very common SAT Writing mistake). You need to find a way to get lesson material to teach yourself the main concepts you're forgetting. You then need to find more practice questions for this skill so you can drill your mistakes. This is by far the best way to improve your SAT Writing score.