Writing Skills
The Writing Skills domain tests whether you can produce the kind of clear, correct prose a CBP officer writes under time pressure: incident reports, memoranda, and correspondence. Items ask you to spot errors in grammar, usage, punctuation, and sentence structure, or to select the cleanest revision of a clumsy sentence. Correctness matters, but so does clarity - the best answer is both grammatical and shorter.
Rules that generate most items
- Subject–verb agreement: find the true subject and ignore interrupting phrases. "Each," "every," "either," "neither," "one," and "anybody" are singular, so "Each of the inspectors ... has."
- Pronoun case and reference: after prepositions and "between," use object pronouns ("between you and me"). Every "it," "they," or "which" needs one unmistakable antecedent.
- Parallelism: items in a list or comparison share grammatical form. "Screening cargo, questioning travelers, and writing reports" - not "...and to write reports."
- Modifiers sit next to what they modify. "Having cleared the checkpoint, the officer waved the driver through" - not "Having cleared the checkpoint, the driver was waved through."
- Commas mark introductory elements, set off nonessential information, and precede a coordinating conjunction joining two independent clauses. Never join two independent clauses with only a comma, or with a comma plus "however."
- Apostrophes: "its" is possessive, "it's" means "it is." Plural possessives put the apostrophe after the s ("officers' reports").
- Diction: fewer for countable items, less for mass; who for people, which for things.
Worked example
"Each of the inspectors assigned to the secondary lanes have completed the canine-awareness briefing, and they recommend that the training is repeated annually."
Three fixes. First, the subject is "each," not "inspectors," so the verb must be "has completed." Second, "they" has no clear plural antecedent; name the group. Third, "recommend that" takes the subjunctive - "that the training be repeated." Revision: "Each of the inspectors assigned to the secondary lanes has completed the canine-awareness briefing, and the inspectors recommend that the training be repeated annually."
Traps that cost marks
- Long phrases between subject and verb that conceal a disagreement.
- Sentences that sound natural but contain a dangling modifier.
- Fixing grammar while adding wordiness; check whether the shortest option is also correct.
- A misplaced comma that turns essential information into a disposable aside.