Sentence Correction

if you're a q50 level student who's having trouble with verbal, my no. 1 advice to you is to concentrate on sentence correction.
you see, sentence correction is the most "quant-like" of the three verbal areas, in that many of the errors are mechanical and black-and-white, requiring the same sort of reasoning that solves quant problems.

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here is a listing of the sentence correction error types that are most like "quant" in the type of reasoning required to resolve them:

* pronouns: pronoun usage is VERY mechanical; finding the antecedent for a pronoun is not unlike finding a value for a variable. in particular, pronoun usage is based almost entirely on binary concepts such as singular/plural, subject/object, and so on.
HOW TO RECOGNIZE: for pronoun issues, at least the recognition part is easy: if you see a pronoun, you should consider pronoun issues.

* parallel structure: parallelism is, again, VERY mechanical. you can resolve the vast majority of parallelism issues using completely mechanical concepts such as parts of speech, although there are the occasional problems that depend upon more abstract notions, such as "logical parallelism".
HOW TO RECOGNIZE: recognizing parallel structure is a bit trickier than recognizing pronoun issues. here are a couple of hints, though:
(1) long sentences more often than not involve parallelism, because there are relatively few ways to lengthen a sentence without the use of parallel structure. therefore, if you see a longer sentence, you shouldn't be intimidated; instead, you should just keep an eye out for parallel structure.
(2) the OG has "parallelism" as an explicit label on problems that include parallelism. therefore, if you're having extreme trouble locating parallelism in problems, you should consider going to the problems that are labeled "parallelism" in the back of the book, studying their form, and learning to recognize that they involve parallelism. you should do this before you concentrate on actually solving those problems, because knowing how to solve a problem is useless unless you can actually recognize the problem in the first place.
_________________
ron purewal

instructor, mgmat

and another one:
* certain modifiers: modifiers are diverse, but there are 2 kinds that are easier to recognize, instantly, than others.

(1) initial modifiers without subjects:
"coming home from school, the wind blew me off my bike."
this sentence is incorrect, because, taken literally, it says that the wind was coming home from school.
you can't hide modifiers like this one; they appear at the very beginning of the sentence, every time. if there's no subject, then the modifier automatically refers to whatever noun immediately follows the comma. if that noun is incorrect, then you can kill that answer choice without even looking any further.

(2) relative pronouns following commas:
..., which
..., whom
..., where/when
..., of which
..., to whom
etc.
(this is not a complete list; it's just a collection of samples. similar constructions behave similarly.)
when these pronouns follow a comma, they automatically refer to the immediately preceding noun -- i.e., the noun that touches the comma.
again, they can't hide these. they're easy to recognize, and they're not dependent on the rest of the context. therefore, you should learn to hit them up first.

_________________
ron purewal

instructor, mgmat