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You are currently spending a lot of time just working on the original sentence, which is going to be wrong 80% of the time. There are 3 places you should focus your attention when you go through a question. 1). The first 5-6 words of the underlined portion. 2) the last 5-6 words of the underlined portion. 3) punctuation inside the sentence.

You should focus on each part and notice what the differences are between answer choices. There is only one way for the sentence to properly read. This should help you quickly eliminate groups of answers.

Try to avoid picking errors from the original sentence and applying those to the other answers. Focus more on the differences in answers and your accuracy should go up.

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i received a PM about this thread.

i don't agree with the idea of focusing on these parts during the initial reading. there are 2 serious problems with that:

1/ it's difficult or impossible to understand the meaning of the sentence with that kind of reading; one must read the whole sentence to figure out what it means.

2/ most errors aren't restricted to the underline!
for instance:
* if there is a subject-verb error, then either the subject or the verb will usually fall outside the underline.
* in most parallelism errors, one of the two parallel constructions will be outside the underline.
* in most pronoun errors, either the pronoun or its antecedent will be outside the underline.
* in most two-part idioms (e.g. more ... than), one of the two parts will be outside the underline.
etc.
basically, in anything involving a correspondence between two or more parts, it's very likely that one of the corresponding parts will be found outside the underilne. if you restrict your reading to those three areas, you probably won't notice any of these errors.

if you use these 3 areas as focal points when examining the answer choices, then i am in agreement with you. but if you are actually suggesting that one should do this while reading the original sentence, then, with all due respect, i don't think that will be effective at all -- it will effectively destroy one's ability to understand what the sentence actually means, and will also eliminate one's ability to notice the aforementioned two-part constructions.

there should be only one main focus of the initial reading: what does the sentence mean?
this is imperative, because most errors are impossible to resolve without a firm understanding of the intended meaning of the sentence.
once the meaning of the sentence has been firmly established, then this kind of focus is a good idea in going through the answer choices.

perhaps i've misread this -- but, the beauty of language (and the reason why SC is hard for lots of people) is that there is definitely not "only one way for the sentence to properly read".
almost any sentence can be written in a huge variety of ways, only one of which will actually be the correct answer. this observation accounts for (a) the fact that it's impossible to predict correct SC answers, as well as (b) the fact that it's actually possible for different writers to have different styles. (if it were true that sentences could only be written in one way, then different writing styles couldn't exist.)

in any given SC, four of the five choices will be wrong, but it's a huge mistake to think that there is One True Correct Way in which to write the sentence.

this is on point.

it's also important to note that students won't be able to "pick errors from the original sentence" with any degree of consistency, anyway.
viz., if a student could actually go through a sentence and pick out all the errors, then a fortiori that student would already be able to get 100% of all SC's correct.

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Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

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in response to the original post -- the biggest issue i see is this:

this is the problem -- you're trying to pick out errors in the original sentence. as i stated in the post above, that's not very realistic; if you could do that on a consistent basis, then you wouldn't need any help in SC.

instead of trying to pick out the errors "cold" (something that's very difficult for anyone who is not a professional writer or editor), you should look for HINTS in the answer choices.
in other words, you should learn to interpret HINTS in the answer choices.

here are a few examples:
* if you see a verb switching between singular and plural, then find its subject -- there's probably an issue with S-V agreement.
* if you see ANY pronoun at all, then look for pronoun errors.
* if you see a parallel signal (and, or, not ... but ..., etc.), examine the resulting parallelism.
* if you see modifiers moved around (but written in the same way), figure out which version places the modifiers closer to the things they're actually meant to modify.
* if you see modifiers written differently in different choices, think about the rules for the use of those modifiers.
etc.

when you study SC errors, don't just study the errors themselves -- study the clues that should actually call your attention to those errors in the first place.
in general, you'll notice that the errors themselves aren't very hard to understand -- the problem is finding those errors in the first place. it's not good enough just to study how things work if you won't find them in the first place!

SUMMARY:
for any error type that you study, learn BOTH of the following:
1) How does this thing work? When is it right? When is it wrong? What does it MEAN?
... but also
2) WHEN should I look at this thing?

you can't look for everything all the time, so #2 is just as important as #1.


this is an adaptive test, so you shouldn't put too much stock in the idea of "percent accuracy". if you're getting better, your percent accuracy (on practice tests) probably won't improve at all! (instead, you'll just get questions that fewer people generally get correct.)

are you currently running out of time on the verbal section?

the whole thing is a series of tradeoffs. if english isn't your native language, you may want to allot extra time for SC's, as those are the questions on which the native vs. non-native difference matters most.
in other words, you may want to relax your timing goals for SC a bit, and instead try to improve your comprehension and speed in the other two areas (RC and CR), in which you can focus more on conceptual ideas and don't have to worry about the structure and rhythm of the language.

but, first, you should address the question above -- are you actually running out of time in verbal?
if you aren't -- i.e., if you are actually finishing the verbal section when you take practice tests -- then there's no problem in the first place. you should only think about these kinds of improvements if you aren't currently finishing the test.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

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since i'm already on this thread --

the correct answer to the sentence correction problem posted above (the one about trade routes) should be (a).

contra the poster above, that sentence is not a run-on.
* “firmly established…” is an initial modifier that properly modifies “the various pilgrimage routes”.
* “the various pilgrimage routes ... exchange” is the main clause of the sentence.
* “exemplified…” modifies the preceding noun (“religious and cultural exchange”).
this modifier is not perfect -- it's placed after a compound noun (that is, “x, y, and z”) but is intended to modify only the last part of the compound noun (the spread of an architectural style exemplifies religious and cultural exchange, but certainly not people and probably not trade) -- so you may want to watch out in trusting that sort of general pattern. however, that's a minor issue; otherwise, the sentence in choice (a) is perfect.

(b) has various issues; perhaps most conspicuously, it's not a proper sentence -- it tries to have two main verbs without any sort of connector such as “and”.

in (c), the wording suggests that the spread of romanesque architecture “was firmly established by the twelfth century”. this doesn't make sense; in context, the intended meaning is that the trade routes were established by then. also, “trading people” suggests that people themselves were being traded (= slavery or something akin to it).

in both (d) and (e), the modifier “exemplified…” is inappropriately attached to the pilgrimage routes. this is wrong: in context, “exemplified…” describes cultural and religious exchange.
(it's actually not possible for pilgrimage routes -- which are concrete things -- to be “exemplified” in any context. the proper use of “exemplified” involves stating that some abstract concept is exemplified by some concrete example.)

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron