Communication and Literacy Skills: Reading and Writing
What the test rewards
The Communication and Literacy Skills test measures whether you can read closely and write clearly under time pressure. For reading, know the difference between main idea and supporting detail, and between an explicit statement and an inference. Practice identifying author's purpose, tone, bias, and text structure such as compare-contrast, cause-effect, and problem-solution. For vocabulary, use context clues rather than memorized definitions. For writing, review sentence boundaries, subject-verb agreement, pronoun reference, modifier placement, parallel structure, punctuation, capitalization, and commonly confused words. At the paragraph level, expect questions on topic sentences, unity, coherence, and conciseness.
Traps
Wrong answers are often true statements that do not answer the question, or extreme claims such as "always" and "never" that the passage does not support. In grammar items, interrupting phrases hide agreement errors; strip the phrase and test the core sentence. Watch for comma splices, fragments, dangling modifiers, and ambiguous pronouns. In revision questions, the shortest version is not automatically best; check that meaning and tone are preserved.
Worked example
Sentence: The committee, after reviewing several proposals, decided that its next step was to revise the budget. The subject is the singular noun committee, so its is correct. The plural proposals sits inside a prepositional phrase and does not control the pronoun. Rule of thumb: for agreement, remove interrupting phrases, then match subject to verb or pronoun.