Got a 47 Verbal yesterday, here's my method: pt.2

On sentence correction, my approach is obvious, but it's what works for me. I find that agonizing over which sentence "sounds" the best is generally not too helpful. So that's good news for any non-native speakers. If I get down to two sentences and I really, truly can't decide, then I might select on the basis of what sounds right, but I realized early on that I was getting a lot of the questions wrong when I was trying to answer the questions using my ear. That is partly because the correct GMAT answer is not always the one that sounds the best, and also partly because your ear can get pretty confused after reading a sentence five times in different permutations. I do still rely on my ear a little, generally to rule out answers that have a CLEAR subject-verb agreement problem (these errors will really only be clear if the subject and verb are basically right next to each other in the sentence, because subjects and verbs that are separated by other clauses can also get confusing for your ear), or those that are clearly WAY too wordy or awkward. Basically, I only use my ear to rule out sentences that are EXTREMELY wrong. Hopefully, that can rule out one or two of the choices, but don’t despair if you are not a native speaker and/or don’t trust your ear. I never formally learned English grammar, and only know the terms for the different parts of speech because I’ve studied other languages. I got lucky, because I had a teacher in the eighth grade who taught me all I ever needed to know to resolve these types of grammar uncertainties. The method that I learned from him was this: ignore any parts of the sentence that are not in question so that you can simplify the sentence. For instance, consider this sample question:

Violence in the stands at soccer matches has gotten so pronounced in several European countries that some stadiums have adopted new rules that aim to identify fans of visiting teams and that seat them in a separate area.

A. to identify fans of visiting teams and that seat them
B. to identify fans of visiting teams and seat them
C. to identify fans of visiting teams for seating
D. at identifying fans of visiting teams so as to seat them
E. at identifying fans of visiting teams and that seat them

In this question, you can remove the entire first half of the sentence (“Violence in the stands at soccer matches has gotten so pronounced in several European countries that some”), as well as the prepositional phrase “of visiting teams” without disturbing the structure of the phrase in question. Now your sentence is just “Stadiums have adopted new rules that aim to identify fans and that seat them in a separate area.”

From there, I would first try to ignore the details in the sentence so that I could figure out its structure. In this sentence, the structure is “Stadiums have adopted new rules that __X__ and that __Y__,” where X = “aim to identify fans” and Y = “seat them in a separate area.”
Looking at the sentence this way, I can see that the phrases “that __X__” and “that __Y__” are independent from each other, and that each refers to the “new rules”. As a result, the sentence should still make sense if I cover up “that __X__ and,” and read the sentence as “Stadiums have adopted new rules that __Y__.

But plugging the Y back into that sentence leaves me with: “Stadiums have adopted new rules that seat them [fans] in a separate area.” This doesn’t make sense because rules (inanimate objects) cannot themselves undertake the action of seating fans in a separate area.
Instead, you can see that the two phrases X and Y are not actually independent, because the sentence is trying to say that the new rules aim to __X__ and the new rules also aim to __Y__. To avoid being repetitive, you would normally remove the second instance of “aim to,” leaving you with “the new rules aim to __X__ and __Y__,” or “the new rules aim to (identify fans) and (seat them in a separate area).” That’s choice B.

If you really can’t figure the answer out from this method of strategically removing pieces of the sentence that are irrelevant to the grammatical question at hand, make strategic guesses. I have noticed that in sentence correction questions, the five answer choices are usually broken down so that three begin one way (here, they begin with “to identify,” and the other two begin another way (here, “at identifying”). The correct one is almost always (not ALWAYS, but nearly every time) the one with three choices rather than three. So that should knock off answers D and E right off the bat. You’ve got a one in three chance! Choice C might sound good to your ear, but try to think about what it means. If the new rules aimed to identify fans for seating in a separate area, it would mean that the purpose of the new rules was primarily to identify fans in order to place them in already-designated seating areas. Looking at the entire question, it seems more likely that the stadiums did not have separate seating areas until the new rules took effect. Had they already had separate seating areas, the countries probably would not have been so much violence in the first place. So we can assume that the new rules were designed with the intention of achieving two separate goals: first, identifying fans, and second, seating them in a newly-created separate area. So knock off C. You’re down to a one in two chance!

And a final word of advice on the sentence correction section: if you still have a fair amount of time left before the test, READ! Spend at least an hour every day reading any writing that you trust to have grammatically correct prose, and try to keep an eye out for idioms and complex (i.e. multi-clausal) sentences. I truly believe that reading good writing is the best way to learn how to write well.