TOEFL® Build a Sentence: Getting Grammar Right Under Pressure
Build a Sentence tests something narrower and more mechanical than the other Writing tasks: can you construct a single, fully correct sentence? There's no content to develop and no opinion to argue — just grammar, precisely applied.
Find the subject and verb before anything else
Every correct sentence needs a subject that agrees with its verb in number and tense. Before worrying about word order or style, identify these two pieces and confirm they match — "the students were," not "the students was." Most errors on this task trace back to this single check being skipped.
Common patterns worth knowing cold
Adjective order — English adjectives follow a fairly fixed order (opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material) — "a beautiful small old round black Italian vase," not a random order.
Comparative structures — "more interesting than," "as tall as," "the most important" — mixing these patterns is a frequent source of errors.
Relative clauses — "who," "which," "that" need to match what they're describing (people vs. things) and be placed directly after it.
Conditional sentences — if-clauses have fixed tense pairings ("If it rains, we will..." not "If it will rain, we will...").
Example
Incorrect: "The report, that was written by the team, were late."
Correct: "The report, which was written by the team, was late."
Two fixes: "which" for a thing (not "that" after a comma), and "was" to agree with the singular subject "report."
Read your finished sentence once, out loud in your head, from start to finish — errors that are easy to miss while constructing a sentence piece by piece often become obvious once you hear the whole thing together.
Practice sentence construction with instant grammar feedback on every attempt.