Sentence Correction

lunarpower wrote: you're also correct that considering these topics individually, one by one, with explicit thinking, will eat up a lot of time.
the missing link is that that's a temporary state.

lunarpower wrote:i received a private message regarding this thread.

when it comes to discussing sentence correction strategy, the elephant in the room -- the thing that no one likes to talk about -- is the fact that you can't progress past a certain level in sentence correction without significant intuition.
in fact, this is one of the principal reasons why the test writers chose to include sentence correction, of all things, on a test for business-school applicants (who have no explicit need for the actual skill set required to solve SC problems). namely, any given sentence (except the simplest ones) has way too many moving parts to process entirely through rules and conscious thought processes. you can look consciously for the most major topics -- and thereby do decently well -- but you're not going to reach the highest levels without developing the right intuition.

as an analogy, think about listening to a symphony orchestra. if you are a conductor, you have to listen to the entire orchestra at the same time, and you have to detect mistakes. how do conductors do this? primarily through intuition -- no conductor will be able to consciously analyze the instruments one at a time, at the actual pace of a symphony piece. the conductor might be consciously listening to the most conspicuous instruments -- first violin, first cello, and/or whoever is playing a solo or cadenza -- but he or she clearly can't pay conscious attention to all of the instruments at once. that has to be done intuitively.
similarly, in sentence correction, the best you can do with conscious rules and thought processes is to pay attention to the few most significant "instruments". in that respect, your checklist is a pretty good start -- most things in your checklist do qualify as major topics. however, you've got to realize that this checklist is not the end goal; you should view it as an intermediate step in developing the right kind of intuition.
if you are studying to become a conductor, you have to study each instrument explicitly at some point -- but not with the end goal of continuing to think explicitly about that instrument. instead, the goal is to incorporate those thoughts, eventually, into an intuitive process that's more subconscious and fluid. (this is also the only real justification for spending more than a trivial amount of time studying, since all of the individual concepts are rather simple -- it's just integrating them into that intuition that takes time and experience.)
similarly, if you are studying to become a sentence correction expert, you do have to study the components explicitly -- but that's the starting point, not the point of mastery. mastery is what you have when you can notice things without explicitly having to look for them anymore.

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in sum:
* your checklist is pretty good; these topics together should be able to knock out many, perhaps even most, of the problems you'll encounter.
* you're also correct that considering these topics individually, one by one, with explicit thinking, will eat up a lot of time.
the missing link is that that's a temporary state. if you feel yourself developing the right intuition, don't discard it in favor of continuing to use rules all the time.