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Land Your Score: Solving Sentence Correction

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Remember these Sentence Correction tips.

Jennifer Land offers GMAT strategies for diagnosing grammatical problems.

GMAT Sentence Correction draws on rules and skills most people learned in elementary school. That’s one reason why it helps to have some guidance on specific issues and errors you are likely to see on Test Day. These tips will help you answer Sentence Correction questions efficiently.

Tip #1: Note the first underlined word

The first underlined word in a Sentence Correction question is likely to be the source of the error. Sometimes it’s not the source of the error, but frequently it is, especially when that first word is a verb or a pronoun. So, identify its part of speech, and be suspicious.

Tip #2: Find the subject/verb pair

If the first underlined word is a verb, always locate its subject. If a verb is underlined but is not the first word, you should identify its subject. The subject and verb must match in number; this is called agreement. The GMAT likes to stick words and phrases between the subject and the verb to make this agreement unclear. Look at this example:

Every one of the police reports have been filed so that they can be located by their case number, the date they were created, or the victim’s last name.

The word before “have been filed” is “reports.” That’s a plural verb preceded by a plural noun. However, “reports” is not the subject here; “one” is the subject, meaning that the plural verb is an error in this sentence. You could then look over the answer choices and immediately eliminate any that begin with “have been filed”; the correct verb must be singular. In this case the correct verb would be “has been filed.”

Tip #3: Match the pronoun to its antecedent

Much as you would with verbs, when you encounter an underlined pronoun, identify the noun it represents (called its antecedent). Be sure the antecedent is unambiguous and that it matches the pronoun in gender and/or number.

In the previous example, the underlined pronouns “they” and “their” are plural, but the antecedent “one,” is singular. Here’s another example:

The government has imposed sanctions and restricted foreign aid to a renegade nation last month after it violated the terms of a worldwide arms control treaty.

First word? Verb. Subject? “Government.” No error there. Is there an underlined pronoun? Yes, “it.” What is the antecedent? Well… it seems like the pronoun “it” refers to the “renegade nation,” but it isn’t perfectly clear. It could refer to “the government,” too. On the GMAT this relationship must be unambiguous, or undeniably clear. When you assess the answer choices, look for one that clearly links the pronoun to its antecedent.

Tip #4: Don’t predict the Sentence Correction

Lastly, although you might prefer to rewrite the entire sentence, you can’t. You can only change the portion of the sentence that is underlined. So, once you’ve spotted the error, resist the urge to correct it in your head. Instead, look at the answer choices and simply eliminate the options that do not correct the error (and/or introduce a new error).

As you review and rebuild your grammar skills, keep these tips in mind to land your highest score on the GMAT.

Want to master Sentence Correction problems? Explore our GMAT prep course options and class schedules.

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