Ron Purewal Notes

hello all,
i've been alerted to this page by a student.


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• two parallelism files:

these seem to be aggregations of screenshots and/or other content from "thursdays with me". so, yes, this content is mine.

the order of presentation, too, is at least somewhat sensible (...most likely because it mirrors the original order of presentation in "thursdays").


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• SC tips file:
this appears to be a collection of things i wrote on manhattan prep's forum over the years i worked for the company. so, yes, this content is mine.

HOWEVER... even though these little bits and pieces of content are, ultimately, mine...
this document will NOT be useful as a preparatory instrument for the GMAT, for 3 reasons:


1/
the content aggregated in this document is COMPLETELY RANDOM.

the items in the document are not unified/connected by any coherent theme. nor do they illustrate, explain, or reinforce any common idea or principle.


2/
MOST of these items are FAR too specific to be useful "takeaways".
the chance that you'll see THESE EXACT CONSTRUCTIONS again, on test day, is essentially zero.


...and, worst of all,

3/
MOST of these items come from answer choices THAT ALSO CONTAIN OTHER, MUCH MORE IMPORTANT, MUCH MORE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES!

in most of these cases, i was doing my best to indulge a student's curiosity by answering all of his/her questions about that problem/choice, with a clear understanding that these unique, ultra-specific, highly specialized parts of the sentence are the UNIMPORTANT parts.

in other words, the person who compiled this document has CONSISTENTLY chosen to INCLUDE the LEAST important, LEAST useful pieces of the original forum discussions — while THROWING AWAY the PARTS THAT ACTUALLY MATTER!

EXAMPLE:
#16 in the document
("mideast immigrants" is worse; "immigrants from the mideast" is better)

the original problem is here:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/mideast-immi ... 75746.html
"mideast immigrants" is in choices A, B, and C.

••ALL•• of those choices also contain FUNDAMENTAL ERRORS in BASIC, ground-level constructions:
—A and B have a nonsense comparison (RATES vs OTHER IMMIGRANT GROUPS);
—E has subject-verb disagreement (the RATES ... EXCEEDS...)
these errors are so basic that you MUST see them first and foremost.

in other words. even THINKING about "mideast immigrants" vs. "immigrants from the mideast" in this problem is a HUGE MISTAKE. if you consider those parts of the choices AT ALL, then your priorities are COMPLETELY BACKWARDS!
...and yet the author of this document included THAT part... and threw away all of the FUNDAMENTALS.

nearly the whole document does the same thing. over and over and over again... extracting THE LEAST IMPORTANT PART of a whole forum discussion, while completely ignoring all the fundamental, heavily tested issues.

there's exactly ONE way in which this document CAN be useful: it shows exactly how you SHOULDN'T study sentence correction.


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• "CR copy" file:

this content is NOT mine.
i do not appreciate this sort of misattribution. please do your due diligence before crediting material to its supposed source, ladies and gentlemen; thank you in advance.

most of this document is fundamentally misguided, in both scope and technique.

by "scope" i mean the same sort of thing as above — again, there's an excessive focus on incredibly specific details that have NO reasonable chance of appearing on test day.

by "technique" i mean that this document just tells you to do things that you straight-up should not do.
e.g., the second page tells you to read CR passages — AND "classify" them as "weak or strong" (what does that even mean??) — BEFORE reading the question stem!
oh heck no.
you should ALWAYS read the question stem FIRST — because you have no idea what you're supposed to DO with the stimulus/passage until you read the stem.
if you follow the directions in this document, you'll waste an ungodly amount of time reading blocks of text without ANY way to determine what's important or why, and without ANY sense of what to DO with that text.
you'll also waste your time doing absurd things like translating "some" and "most" into numerical percentages ... among many, many other utterly non-goal-oriented, time-wasting, intuition-destroying things this document tells you to do.

...no.

(have a nice day!)