Read the entire sentence carefully. Try to understand the specific idea or relationship that the sentence should express.
- Since the part of the sentence that may be incorrect is underlined, concentrate on evaluating part for errors and possible corrections before reading the answer choices.
- Read each answer choice carefully. The first answer choice always repeats the underlined portion of the original sentence. Choose this answer if you think that the sentence is best as it stands, but only after examining all of the other choices.
- Try to determine how well each choice corrects whatever you consider wrong with the original sentence.
- Make sure that you evaluate the sentence and the choices in terms of general clarity, grammatical and idiomatic usage, economy and precision of language, and appropriateness of diction.
Read the whole sentence, substituting the choice that you prefer for the underlined part. A choice may be wrong because it does not fit grammatically or structurally with the rest of the sentence. Remember that some sentences will require no corrections. The answer to such a sentence should be the first answer choice.
Subject-verb agreement is a critical stumbling block for many students when facing sentence correction questions. You need to make sure that singular subjects have singular verbs and that plural subjects have plural verbs. If you're a native speaker, you probably follow this simple grammatical rule so automatically that you may wonder why the GMAT tests it at all. But the test makers craftily separate subject and verb with lots of text, to make it harder to recognize whether the subject and verb agree.
While taking the test, you should be on the look out for the following:
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One or more long modifying phrases or clauses following the subject |
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Phrases and clauses in commas between subject and the verb |
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Subjects joined by either/or and neither/nor |
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Sentences in which the verb precedes the subject |
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Collective nouns, such as majority, system, audience, and committee
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Consider the following example:
There is, without a doubt, many good reasons to exercise.
Answer: There are many good reasons. A good strategy is to ignore temporarily parts of the sentence that are set off by commas. |
