Sentence Correction

Enginpasa1 wrote:I went through many questions and and realized where I am lacking. One of my weaknesses is to eliminate and process the wrong answers against each other. Now, does anyone have an approach towards a stellar poe and way to use the wrong answers against each other. My previous successes have been to learn the wrong answers and then you can easily identify the right answer. Can anyone help?

this question is extremely general, to the extent that i'll be able to say little more than platitudes. but i'll have a go:

* you need to get a feeling for the way the correct answers use language. in the same way you might read a favorite magazine and get a sense of its particular writing style, you should, likewise, peruse correct answers (say in the back of the o.g., especially if you've already gone through and done the problems before) until you think you have a better feeling for the way in which they're written. every author has his/her own style, a verity to which the gmat authors are no exception.
- pay particular attention to whatever the o.g. labels as 'awkward' or 'wordy', especially things that you didn't recognize as such. only by studying these diligently can you hope to eliminate them correctly on the actual test.

* as i've said before in connection with one of your earlier posts, you should concentrate on one error at a time. if you try to learn all of the errors in the same study session, you'll most likely end up learning none of them, as your attention will be fatally divided.

* be sure to compare answer choices to each other. there are many subtle errors which you'd never catch if they were presented alone in a line of text, but which become somewhat obvious if they are juxtaposed with answer choices that don't commit them.
- a nice example is #106 in the o.g. verbal supplement (the purple book), in which the extra 'were' is necessary. this is probably not something you'd notice if you were considering this choice in isolation and trying to determine whether it's 'wrong'; only by comparing the choices with were to the choices without it would you likely spot the importance of the difference.

* perhaps memorize 'chapter headings' corresponding to the different subject areas of sentence correction. if you really don't see anything that looks like an error in the choices you have left, maybe just run through the different error types, asking yourself whether each of them, in succession, is in the problem: is there a s-v agreement error? is there a parallelism error? is there a modifier error? etc.