Hey Mundasingh:
I've been looking at this post for a little over a day now trying to figure out how to reply...
That title frightens me, so let me lead with that:
1) You really can't and shouldn't cram for GMAT sentence correction, and particularly not for all the subtleties. The English language is just too big and nuanced and you'll drive yourself crazy trying.
2) SC subtleties are exponentially less important than the SC staples. Your goal should be to become amazingly good at Modifiers, Pronouns, Subject-Verb Agreement, Verb Tense, etc. Then just ride those to success. I'm amazed at how often I see students dissect nuances and subtleties when there's a glaring numerical error - S-V Agreement or Pronoun - that's almost typed in red in my eyes. One of my all-time favorite students, Will, was just like that - I told him multiple times that I just couldn't help him. I didn't know nearly enough grammar to keep up with his explanations and I just felt bad accepting money for that time with him. But he was still getting questions wrong and I was getting them all right, and he was pretty adamant that he wanted to keep working together, so our rule was that we could only use about 8 words to describe SC errors and if it didn't fall into one of those categories we'd mark it to come back to. That's how he learned GMAT SC - he went from 580 to 700 by reducing the number of grammatical words he used. No more "gerund" or "participial" - just keep it simple and standardized. Tense, Pronoun, Modifier...
If you're hammering the systematic stuff, then you can always use the subtleties that you have picked up over time but you're not relying on it. It's really similar to the math section; if you use odd/even and unit's digit number properties, you don't have to do as much math. You're spending less time and energy per problem, but it's just as effective. That's the key with verbal, too - the GMAT wants you to find easier ways to do things...in many ways that's what it's testing.
One of my favorite problems that I've seen on these forums is "What is the tens digit of 11^13?" (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/09/ ... ries-day-5). You'd spend hours doing all that math, but following the pattern gets you the answer in less than two minutes. Well, verbal is really similar - you can spend hours poring over obscure grammar rules, but the GMAT gives you an out. Learn the systematic stuff well and you won't have to worry much about anything else.
