Sentence Correction

Hey everyone,

So back in December I took the GMAT, took 3-4 weeks off, and got back into study mode again in February (with the goal of re-taking the test in April). Now that I have been studying for about a month, I'm getting to the point with SC where I wonder if it would be more beneficial for my overall progress to spend a day (or more) picking random problems from OG 13 & V2 and start categorizing the underlined parts based on grammar and signals. For example, if one question has an underlined portion that says, "obese more due to the fact that...than overeating" - I could say "Hey, I noticed the word than which indicates comparison and it's actually in the parallel form more x than y." If I can more quickly notice these signals, then I don't have to waste time deciding between "due to the fact" and a word like" because" if that's a split.

Currently, I have been reviewing each SC topic briefly in my MGMAT SC book (I had already read all the chapters in the fall), answering 8-10 questions of each category a couple of days a week, and then spending Friday doing GMAT Prep verbal practice sets of 10. I also have created an excel error log spreadsheet that I review on Friday's.

What do you guys think? I just feel like I might not be picking up on each category's signals as quickly as I should be. Thanks.

Great idea - that's pretty much a perfect strategy for where you're at right now. Learning the major error categories is important, but there are diminishing returns to reviewing the same grammar rules over and over outside the context of the way you'll see questions on the exam.

Like you said, you need to start to better recognize those signals that tell you "check subject verb agreement here" or "this pronoun is going to be important", and if you already know that you're doing a set of 10 pronoun questions you'll not likely have to develop that kind of recognition. Scaffolding your learning that way is helpful up front, but my hunch is that by now your skills are pretty solid, it's the strategy that will take some work - how do you know when to use each rule or to look for that kind of error?

So I'd turn a lot of your emphasis now to doing sets or 10 and 20 question "uncategorized" sets so that you have to see for yourself which rules/errors to employ. That phrasing you had in there about recognizing the comparative word "than" is exactly what you want to do! Then if you realize after a few sets that you struggle noticing a certain type of error (for example, if 4 of the 5 questions you couldn't quite categorize all involved modifiers, you need to go back to a modifier set to think about which clues you're missing) you can go back and work on those in a more focused way.

Love the plan!

if you already know that you're doing a set of 10 pronoun questions you'll not likely have to develop that kind of recognition.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

So I'd turn a lot of your emphasis now to doing sets or 10 and 20 question "uncategorized" sets so that you have to see for yourself which rules/errors to employ.

Okay great - and I actually bought the extra set of GMAT Prep questions for ~ $25, so I can just run some sets of SC questions through that interface. It's amazing how much easier it is to use the POE techniques when you recognize category signal early on in the problem.

Thanks for the comment!