Jerry Buchanan was honoured by the President not only as a great paint

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION:

Now, we want you to look at the first two or three words of every option and group the options on this basis.

Three of the options start with but also, one with having and one with but because. Now if you know your idioms, you would know that not only (in the non-underlined part of the sentence) always requires a but also. So, options (B) and (C) can be eliminated without even reading another word. This will save you valuable time, enabling you to finish the question in less than a minute.

Amongst the remaining three options, you can now do another split—should it be but also because (A) or but also as ((D) and (E))? Since not only is followed by as, but also too needs to be followed by as. So, (A) gets eliminated.

Between (D) and (E), (D) is more concise. Also a prolific writer is parallel to a great painter. Thus, D should be the correct answer.

The important thing to note in the above example is that we did not read any of the options (except maybe the last two) completely. We just looked at a few words strategically and eliminated. This is the approach that you should try to adopt for every Sentence Correction question that you see on the GMAT.

You may not always be able to group the options using the first words; sometimes you can do this using the last words; sometimes you can do this using the error itself (assuming you have already spotted the error); sometimes you can do this using an idiom. What you need to ensure is that you are always reading vertically and eliminating options, rather than reading horizontally and wasting your time/getting confused.