GMAT sentence correction is about vision, logic assessment of situations, use of effective processes and decision making skills rather than a grammar test. Mastering the wordplay techniques to rightly convey the effective meaning will take you a long way in identifying the concise answer choice.
GMAT format for Sentence Correction:
The GMAT format for “SC section” have questions in which a phrase is underlined.Sometimes the entire question itself is underlined and the answers represent the best version of the underlined text. The student is expected to choose amongst the five choices given.Note that the choice A duplicates the original version.
Idioms:
Knowledge of idioms is an added advantage.Nevertheless hacking your way to the answers become achievable with other logical reasoning. Idiomatic constructions have their own form and you need to learn the ones that often appear in practice questions.
Initially analyze why the wrong versions are so and the remaining versions are right and eventually, the vision and the hacking skills improve to accomplish the correction.
English Grammar:
Significant progress would become possible if you are aware of below:
- Matching subjects and verbs that correct the errors concerning agreement and punctuation placement. Be careful wherever the verbs precede the subject.
- Good hold on restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers. Ensure if they are adjective or adverbs used rightly in the sentence.
- Being well aware of the pronouns and the nouns that the sentences refer to.
- Learn to distinguish the WHO and WHOM in a sentence. When the pronoun is acting as a subject use WHO, else if the object uses WHOM.
- The literary technique of working with parallelism and lists in a sentence.
- Comparisons: Keep in mind to compare logically similar things or grammatically similar things.
Time:
Apart from the English grammar knowledge, one has to keep in mind about time and effectively make use of it. Reading all the five choices carefully to choose an answer is an absolute train wreck approach. You have to quickly narrow down the answer choices to one or two and re-read them aloud and ensure that the sentences are right. In case an error is found, search for more choices with the same error.Mostly this way two – three choices get eliminated. Further, consider more errors and keep arriving at the best choice. If no errors then go with the “A” option.
Distractors:
Be smart enough to spot the distractors. I have made a mention of few of them below:
Subjects must be stated only once in a sentence. Double subjects are meant to be avoided. Eliminate such choices.
9 times out of 10 the answer choices can be done away with “ing” verbs, nouns or pronouns that are necessarily used to distract students. GMAT generally prefers to use simpler tense.
Keep an eye on the missing verbs in a sentence usually occurring with long sentences.
Get rid of the answer choices with ambiguity.
Last but not the least keep in mind that GMAT style has the inclination to Queen’s English and not the accustomed email writing /SMS texting style.
