GMAT Strategy

Hey all-

I am a native english speaker but having great difficulty identifying the nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. in a sentence. I have gone through the MGMAT Foundations of Verbal book but still can't identify the above categories of words consistently. I think that if I had more examples to practice I would be able to ace this. Does anyone know of good resources for this? Thanks for your help.

This is a decent resource for building grammar fundamentals: https://www.dailygrammar.com/archive.html

(Note: I would not suggest working through the entire site. Use as needed to practice identifying different parts of speech. Once you feel your fundamentals are strong enough, move on to the Sentence Correction section of the Official Guide.)

And once you're ready for higher level strategic thinking, here is Veritas' Sentence Correction lesson: https://www.veritasprep.com/gmat/free-gmat-lesson/

Hi schelljo,

I'm also curious to know how you've been performing on practice exams (if you've taken them). You might be surprised to find there are other areas you should be focusing on more than SC, especially as a native English speaker. The only way to find out is to dive right in to a practice CAT and analyze your performance.

That being said, we recently posted a beginner's guide to SC, which you can check out here: https://bit.ly/1GKZlEV

Best,
Rich

Hey all-

Thanks for the replies. A few notes:

1. I have been only studying for 30 days now.
2. I have only used the MGMAT book "Foundations of Verbal" and not the MGMAT Sentence Correction strategy guide yet.
3. I have taken a CAT and my score was 640 with 49 Quant and a 28 Verbal.
4. Overall goal score is 720.

Hey schelljo,

Knowing the parts of speech is helpful only to the extent that they help you identify potential errors (i.e. Subject-Verb Agreement, Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement, etc.) Here's really all you have to know:

There are 8 parts of speech in the English language: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Interjections are not part of any GMAT grammar errors, so you don't even have to worry about those!

Nouns are words that refer to people, places, things, and ideas. For example, "Paris," "dad," "clarinet," and "Love" are all nouns. They can be capitalized or not capitalized (the GMAT doesn't test capitalization). Nouns are tested on the GMAT in the form of Subject-Verb Agreement, Parallelism, and Comparisons. Nouns can appear throughout a sentence - they can be doing the action of the verb as a subject, or receiving the action of the verb as the object.

Pronouns are words that take the place of a noun.

Example: Marisa went shopping and she purchased a new scarf.

Marisa is the noun (the subject to be precise!) and the word "she" is the pronoun that replaces Marisa. The word that the pronoun refers back to is called the antecedent or referent.

Verbs are very important on the GMAT. These are words that express action or behavior.

Examples: She is tired.
They became team captains.
Varun prepares for the GMAT.

The GMAT tests verbs in Subject-Verb Agreement, Verb Tenses, and Parallelism in a variety of ways.

Adjectives and adverbs are called "modifiers" because they add to or change the meaning of other words. Adjectives describe or modify nouns or pronouns.

Examples: The blue sweater was pale-colored.
The rainy day made us stay inside.

Adverbs are more flexible than adjectives because they can modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs! They almost always end in the suffix -ly so the good news is they are easily identifiable!

Examples: She quickly ran to her chemistry class.
The new puppy jumped excitedly up and down.

Notice that adjectives and adverbs can be positioned both before and after the words they modify. The GMAT tests the use of these words in Modification errors.

Prepositions are not explicitly tested on the GMAT (there is no such thing as a "Preposition error," but they are worth identifying because they are the number one way the GMAT makes simple sentences seem longer and more confusing. A preposition is a connector - these are words that describe location or relationship. Some common prepositions include:

"¢ about
"¢ above
"¢ across
"¢ after
"¢ as
"¢ before
"¢ by
"¢ during
"¢ except
"¢ for
"¢ from
"¢ in
"¢ like
"¢ of
"¢ on
"¢ since
"¢ than
"¢ to
"¢ with

The GMAT can take a relatively simple sentence:

The archaeologist examined the bones.

And turn it into something confusing by adding multiply prepositional phrases:

During the course of the inquiry, the archaeologist from the University of St. Louis examined the bones, except for those discovered after he had left the dig site, since they were going to be shipped to the lab at a later date.

If you can recognize all those prepositions, you can mentally remove the unnecessary verbiage as you search for a grammar error. Noticing that a sentence has too many prepositions can help you identify style errors such as wordiness and awkwardness.

Honestly, that's really ALL you need to know about parts of speech. If you already know all of this stuff, you should go ahead and get started on the MGMAT Sentence Correction book: https://www.amazon.com/Sentence-Correcti ... 0979017572

That's where you'll learn how these parts of speech manifest as actual GMAT errors, and that's the important things to learn! I wouldn't waste any more time on parts of speech as a standalone topic.

You can see some free SC questions here: https://gmatrockstar.com/tag/gmat-sentence-correction/

Best,
Vivian[/url]

Vivian-

Thanks so very much. This is amazing. I was working through the MGMAT Foundations book and they break it up by all these categorizes for verbs,nouns, etc. and was getting confused.