Wynton Marsalis

Today’s SAT question of the day is a writing multiple choice question about Wynton Marsalis and transitions.

Let’s focus on the issue:

[He won] Grammy awards for both his jazz and even classical works.

“Both, and” is a common construction – you are both bored and hopeful, probably, while preparing for your upcoming test.  But you couldn’t be both bored and even hopeful – you could be bored and even hopeful, but we can’t stick the word “both” in there with “even”.

Why not?  Because we say “both” knowing that two things are coming.  We can’t then act surprised with “even” – there’s no surprise, because we already said there were two things in our list.  If you’d like a more technical explanation, these are correlative conjunctions that need to be both balanced and parallel.

This subtle error may not look or sound wrong to you on the first pass, but as you read each underlined answer choice, consider if the words it contains are each correct and necessary for the sentence.