Competency 1: Knowledge of language structure

Four skills. Not five, not a vague area of study. The rule states four, and you can read them in about thirty seconds.

The four skills, as the rule states them

1. Evaluate correct placement of modifiers. 2. Apply knowledge of parallelism, including parallel expressions for parallel ideas. 3. Apply knowledge of a variety of effective structures (e.g., recognizing fragments, comma splices, run-on sentences, syntax errors). 4. Determine patterns of organization in a written passage (i.e., modes of rhetoric).

Section 82, Competencies and Skills Required for Teacher Certification in Florida, Twenty-Eighth Edition, incorporated into Rule 6A-4.0021, F.A.C.

Those verbs matter more than they look. Three of the four say evaluate, apply or recognize, which is the language of spotting an error in someone else's sentence. Only the fourth asks you to characterize a whole passage. Nothing here asks you to write.

How much of the subtest this is

Skill 1: modifier placement

A modifier attaches to the nearest thing it can attach to. Move it and you change the sentence. The exam tests whether you notice when the nearest thing is the wrong thing.

Detail is in misplaced and dangling modifiers, including the two shapes that account for most of the tested cases.

Skill 2: parallelism

The rule adds a gloss: "including parallel expressions for parallel ideas". That is broader than the list-of-three case most people revise. Comparisons, correlative pairs like not only and but also, and items joined by and all fall under it. See parallel structure.

Skill 3: effective structures

The rule names the four things it means: fragments, comma splices, run-on sentences and syntax errors. Three of those four are the same underlying question, which is where one independent clause stops and the next begins. Sentence fragments and run-ons takes that apart.

Skill 4: patterns of organization

This is the odd one out and the one people skip. "Modes of rhetoric" means the shapes a passage can take: narration, description, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, definition, classification, process. A question here gives you a short passage and asks how it is put together rather than what it says.

It is worth ten minutes of your revision, no more. On our split the whole competency is about six questions and this is one skill of four inside it. Learn the seven names, learn the signal words that go with each, and move on.

• Comparison and contrast: however, whereas, similarly, on the other hand
• Cause and effect: because, therefore, consequently, as a result
• Process or sequence: first, then, finally, after
• Classification: types, categories, kinds, falls into

What we would do with this competency

Spend your time on skills 1 to 3 and treat skill 4 as vocabulary. The first three are error-spotting under a 1.33-minute clock, which is the pace this subtest runs at on our arithmetic, and they respond to drilling in a way that comprehension questions do not.

One caution. Because this competency is small on our estimate, it is tempting to skip it. Six questions out of 30 against a pass mark of about 19 correct is not skippable. It is roughly a third of your margin.