i received a PM about this thread.
Jim@StratusPrep wrote:You are currently spending a lot of time just working on the original sentence, which is going to be wrong 80% of the time. There are 3 places you should focus your attention when you go through a question. 1). The first 5-6 words of the underlined portion. 2) the last 5-6 words of the underlined portion. 3) punctuation inside the sentence.
i don't agree with the idea of focusing on these parts
during the initial reading. there are 2 serious problems with that:
1/ it's difficult or impossible to understand the meaning of the sentence with that kind of reading; one must read the whole sentence to figure out what it means.
2/ most errors aren't restricted to the underline!
for instance:
* if there is a subject-verb error, then either the subject or the verb will usually fall outside the underline.
* in most parallelism errors, one of the two parallel constructions will be outside the underline.
* in most pronoun errors, either the pronoun or its antecedent will be outside the underline.
* in most two-part idioms (e.g.
more ... than), one of the two parts will be outside the underline.
etc.
basically, in anything involving a correspondence between two or more parts, it's very likely that one of the corresponding parts will be found outside the underilne. if you restrict your reading to those three areas, you probably won't notice
any of these errors.
if you use these 3 areas as focal points
when examining the answer choices, then i am in agreement with you. but if you are actually suggesting that one should do this
while reading the original sentence, then, with all due respect, i don't think that will be effective at all -- it will effectively destroy one's ability to understand what the sentence actually means, and will also eliminate one's ability to notice the aforementioned two-part constructions.
there should be only one main focus of the initial reading:
what does the sentence mean?
this is imperative, because most errors are impossible to resolve without a firm understanding of the intended meaning of the sentence.
once the meaning of the sentence has been firmly established,
then this kind of focus is a good idea
in going through the answer choices.
You should focus on each part and notice what the differences are between answer choices. There is only one way for the sentence to properly read. This should help you quickly eliminate groups of answers.
perhaps i've misread this -- but, the beauty of language (and the reason why SC is hard for lots of people) is that there is definitely
not "only one way for the sentence to properly read".
almost any sentence can be written in a huge variety of ways, only one of which will actually be the correct answer. this observation accounts for (a) the fact that it's impossible to
predict correct SC answers, as well as (b) the fact that it's actually possible for different writers to have different styles. (if it were true that sentences could only be written in one way, then different writing styles couldn't exist.)
in any given SC, four of the five choices will be wrong, but it's a huge mistake to think that there is One True Correct Way in which to write the sentence.
Try to avoid picking errors from the original sentence and applying those to the other answers. Focus more on the differences in answers and your accuracy should go up.
this is on point.
it's also important to note that students
won't be able to "pick errors from the original sentence" with any degree of consistency, anyway.
viz., if a student could actually go through a sentence and pick out all the errors, then
a fortiori that student would already be able to get 100% of all SC's correct.
