Beat The GMAT Team's Featured Posts for 2010 - Sentence Correction

by Beat The GMAT, Jan 7, 2011

2010 has been a special year for the Beat The GMAT community. This fall we celebrated our 100,000^th member and this important milestone reminded us all that we are, first and foremost, a community built by our members for our members. We wanted to thank all of our members, both regular test takers and experts, by featuring some of our favorite threads from our forums. Your wonderful contributions are much appreciated by MBA hopefuls everywhere!

Sentence Correction is the most active verbal forum by far. Correctly answering SC questions involves knowing quite a few rules, so its no surprise that people feel the need to discuss this section a lot. Given this, we must admit that it was hard to select just three posts the forum is just packed with good advice about English grammar.

The 2/3 split

One of our favorite strategies when tackling SC questions is the 2/3 split. Its a great way to save time, so make sure you master it! bupbebeo posted a hard question this spring, which received quite a few interesting replies from our community members. sumanr84 and pradeepkaushal9518 had particularly useful inputs. Heres what pradeepkaushal9518 had to say about the 2/3 split:

Try to parse answers vertically before scanning each answer horizontally. This give a hint of changing patterns and you will come to know what exactly is changing among options, (tense is changing, Subject-verb agreement mismatch etc) then you pick your group and proceed to locate the best answer.

Check out the full discussion here.

Modifiers on the GMAT

A lot of GMAT SC questions involve dealing with modifiers, whether they modify nouns, verbs or other grammatical structures. Appositives are a special case of modifiers that popped up quite a bit in our forums this year. ayushiiitm posted a question testing the use of appositives and tenses back in July. GMATGuruNY replied with a series of posts that cover both types of mistakes. Heres a part of his advice:

A modifying phrase placed at the end of a sentence can function in different ways:

John ate all the cookies, upsetting Mary.

In the sentence above, the phrase upsetting Mary is modifying the noun John, because John is upsetting Mary by selfishly eating all the cookies. (If the word upsetting were modifying the noun cookies, the sentence would leave out the comma, as in John ate all the cookies upsetting Mary.)

You can read the entire thread here.

Trying to understand ellipsis? Dont miss out on this

aiming800 wanted to know more about dealing with ellipsis on the GMAT. This grammatical construction may be puzzling, especially when you have to consider ambiguous comparisons. lunarpower and magnus opus kept the conversation going. What we particularly liked about this thread is the multitude of examples used to clear things up:

for instance, here is a genuinely ambiguous sentence:

josh has known tim longer about stephanie.

this can mean two things:

(1) josh has known tim longer than josh has known stephanie;

(2) josh has known tim longer than stephanie has known tim.

You'll find the rest of these inputs by clicking here.

Of course, our forums are just teeming with awesome advice. If you happen to stumble upon a gem, please share it with us in the comments section!