I'm really glad you asked this - Sentence Correction has enormous opportunities for pattern recognition! Patterns can help you very quickly identify common decision points - you'll still have to make the decisions, of course, but there are several structures that should immediately clue you in to the type of decision you need to make, including:
-If the beginning of the sentence includes a description and a comma, and the underline touches it, you're dealing with a modifier. It will look like:
The description is underlined, the noun is fixed (you have to pick the description that fits the noun)
The description is fixed, the noun is underlined (you have to pick the noun that fits the description)
The description is underlined, and so is the noun (you can mix and match, but you have to find a compatible pair of description/noun)
-If the answer choices use different versions of it/they or its/their, you'll have to find the antecedent and match it in singular/plural. And if some of the answer choices don't use a pronoun, give them special attention - often the best way to fix a singular/plural pronoun error is to not use a pronoun at all.
-If the first words of each answer choices show you a decision point (its vs. their, have vs. has, etc.) that's a likely decision point. But more importantly, check the LAST words of each answer choice - that's often a decision point and since people don't see that as immediately you get a little bonus in time and accuracy when you see those quickly.
-If there's a pronoun outside the underlined portion, it's often a signal that there's a singular/plural noun or verb distinction to be made, and that pronoun may be the key to knowing which to use.
-If you see a word that signals time, like "since X" or "from A to B" or "after..", there's a good chance you'll need to find a verb compatible with that timeframe.
-If you see a word or phrase that splits a sentence into two parts ("both" or "either" or "not only...but also" or "just as...so"), you'll have to make a parallelism decision.
There are plenty of others but hopefully this gives you a start. Make sure that you're not just learning rules, but you're looking for patterns of when to employ each rule. Sentence Correction is as much about these clues - about knowing which decision points are important - as it is about anything else.
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
Looking for GMAT practice questions? Try out the Veritas Prep Question Bank.
Learn More.
.
Inference being the tough to crack 
