A question from a student drew my attention to the following SAT Writing question that appeared on the April 2017 SAT.

Here's the relevant paragraph. I've replaced the text of other questions with the correct answers so as not to introduce confusing irrelevancies:

Randall Munroe is a smart guy, but to me it looks like he flubbed the punchline here in the latest XKCD:

Linguist Geoff Pullum has been cataloging instances of well-educated people who cannot distinguish the passive voice from other syntactic structures, the fruits of which are an excellent article, "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive," to appear in Language and Communication. If you teach writing, I highly recommend it.

Back in 2007, I wrote a blog post imagining what Present-Day English would look like if you applied the rules of Old English syntax to it. More than 5 years on, it remains one of the more popular posts here.

Hasty generalizations about grammar quickly get you into trouble. As a case in point, consider the difference between subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement. Both require, in the core cases, attention to the number (singular or plural) of a particular noun phrase. At the same time, there are important differences, and treating the two as identical can lead to significant problems.

A few days ago, a Language Log post mentioned an old Onion article about reverting the grammatical rules of English to something roughly equivalent to Late Old English. It's satire of course (something that seems to have gone over some people's heads), and the article doesn't actually follow a consistent practice.

If you are a high school student studying for one of the big standardized tests (the SAT or the ACT), or if you are the parent of such a student, I have one important piece of advice for you: don't waste your money on commercial test prep books, especially when it comes to the material for writing.