GMAT Verbal & Essays

I have been trying to get consistent with sentence correction with no avail. I seem to randomly get simple questions wrong and nail the supposedly 700+ questions with ease.

Sometimes, it feels like I'm on fire and I can get just about any SC question correct. Other times (most of the time), I feel totally lost - waiting for breadcrumbs to lead me in the right direction. Inevitably, I come across two answers that I like and somehow choose the wrong one...

- Subject-Verb Agreement
- Modifiers
- Parallelism
- Verb Tense
- Comparisons
- Idioms (optional)

These are what I've been trying to wrap my head around. Honestly, I was doing a lot better on sentence correction before I started learning to dissect each sentence. I went with my ear and was getting about 75% correct. After learning all of these new "Look-out"'s, I tend to talk myself out of the right answer.


Tips? Tricks? Anything!

Here are a few tricks I like to use:

1. Mentally "remove" appositive phrases.

Long GMAT sentences often have way too much extra information. Try to mentally delete the useless info, and hone in on the main pieces of the sentence.

2. Listen to your gut.

Your accuracy was better when you were instinctually identifying what "sounded funny" to you. Hone in on that. The point of learning the common errors is to have a mental checklist to go through when you CAN'T identify what "sounds funny".

3. Start by identifying the Subject & the Verb.

Every sentence must have them, and if you start here, you'll be less likely to be overwhelmed by the sentence as a whole.

Good luck!