GMAT Strategy

Hey guys,

I have about a month left before I do the GMATS, and I am having a terrible time with Sentence Correction. I've read through the Manhattan SC guide, but all the examples are laid out in such a straight forward manner, that I find it's not very conducive to learning when applied to the actual OG practice questions/tests. For the math portion I can find enough similarities that jump out at me so I can apply what I've learned, but with SC, I'm finding it difficult to make correlations to grammatical errors. Can anyone give me some tips to speed up this process, or a good schedule for someone studying within my time frame?

I also have the OG, Manhattan SC, Kaplan GMAT Premier/Verbal/Math and Princeton Review textbooks. For people that have worked through these, can you give me some pros/cons or tips that you found from your experiences with these textbooks?

Thanks for reading, I would really appreciate any help you guys can give me. Hope to be around here more often now that I have a membership!

alex.

If you're accuracy in Sentence correction is not high ,that means you haven't grasped the concepts well. And sentence correction is all about knowing the concepts and applying those concepts well. You may want to try Aristotle SC Grail . I think it'll might help you as the book is laid out in quite a structured manner and you'll be able to grasp the concepts better.
Out of the books you've listed, I would advise you to stick to the Official Guide and MGMAT SC Guide .MGMAT SC Guide is quite good .However, some people find it a little confusing.Secondly,it doesn't have practice problems to test your concepts on.
I would really not suggest Princeton Verbal book unless you're really very bad at sentence correction and just want to brush up the basics.

What made things really click for me was this: go through the OG questions and for every incorrect answer choice figure out what the problems are. Then go to the answer section and see if you got all the mistakes. The OG doesn't always list every mistake in each answer choice but I think they get most of them. I know this is a lot of work but it really really helped me.

A small tip over and above what is already mentioned.

Don't focus too much on the technicalities of Grammar. That will help you only at a lower level (knowing that a modifier needs to be placed next to a noun stuff). At a higher level it is questions that will challenge your understanding of the MEANING of the sentence that will challenge you. Sample this: https://www.beatthegmat.com/sc-question-t4943.html#19168

As Joanna mentioned stick to the OG and try to spend time analyzing the answers i.e. the rest of the choices you had to eliminate to get to the right one. As a thumbrule if you spend x minutes of analyzing a quant problem you should spend 5x time analyzing SC questions because each question gives you potentially 4 more ways the rules of grammar according to GMAC are flouted. 4 more ways to know which mistakes to avoid.

Arun

You can also try answering SC questions in this forum and provide as many details as possible on why certain choices are incorrect.