Trouble with long passages with commas.

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Trouble with long passages with commas.

by prada » Mon Dec 30, 2013 5:46 pm
Hey Guys,

I don't need much help for RC or CR but for SC I've always had very ordinary scores. I've watched a few online videos and read The Manhattan GMAT Sentence Corection, 12th Ed. Its helped but not enough. So firstly feel free to recommend a better source of information. Secondly I've found long passages a little overwhelming and confusing. As in, Im not sure what to "match" (parallel, modifiers, subject-verb agree, etc) what to look for as errors and so on. Its all the commas and it becomes a little confusing. For example the question below what should I look for to easily resolve the question?
All the commas confuse me as to what should match what, so how can I simply it to answer it easily? Thanks guys
Dressed as a man and using the name Robert Shurtleff, Deborah Sampson, the first woman to draw a soldier´s pension, joined the Continental Army in 1782 at the age of 22, was injured three times, and was discharged in 1783 because she had become too ill to serve.
A. 22, was injured three times, and was discharged in 1783 because she had become
B. 22, was injured three times, while being discharged in 1783 because she had become
C. 22, and was injured three times, and discharged in 1783, being
D. 22, injured three times, and was discharged in 1783 because she was
E. 22, having been injured three times and discharged in 1783, being
Source: — Sentence Correction |

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by likee » Wed Jan 01, 2014 5:22 am
D, I chose.

Parallelism and past presence "was" is more appropriate than past perfect tense "had become."

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by VivianKerr » Sat Jan 04, 2014 5:50 pm
To start, I think you need to understand proper comma usage. I love Grammar Girl's site for clear explanations, so here's what I'd read first:

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/educat ... use-commas
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/educat ... mma-splice
https://e-gmat.com/blogs/?p=575

Notice how proper comma usage is reliant on understanding how sentences are formed with independent and dependent clauses. Knowing how the GMAT uses dependent clauses (especially modifying clauses) is essential to rocking GMAT SC.

As to what to "look for" when searching for an error, whatever part of speech is underlined tells you what to check! For example, an underlined pronoun tells you to check for pronoun ambiguity or pronoun-antecedent agreement. An underlined participle tells you to check for a verb agreement or a modification error. If "much" or "many" is underlined, you check for a countable/uncountable diction error. This gets easier once you start categorizing every question you see (and every incorrect answer choice) by concept-tested.

This question actually has nothing to do with commas. It's tested parallelism and verb tense.

Deborah JOINED the army, WAS INJURED, and WAS DISCHARGED.

We have three past tense verbs that agree. "HAD BECOME" is correctly past perfect tense, since it is describing an event that took place even earlier back in the past. (She logically got ill BEFORE she was discharged.) The other choices break the parallelism, change the final verb tense to make the meaning illogical, or add transition words that convolute the meaning. Thus, (A) is correct.

Though you need to know what commas are and how they function, remember that Punctuation is NOT a tested GMAT concept in and of itself. Punctuation is merely a clue to help you identify GMAT errors such as Sentence Fragments, Run-ons, Parallelism, or Modification.
Vivian Kerr
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