There is NO Intended Meaning | GMAT Short Tip

Most GMAT experts and trainers will agree with AviGutman that there always is an intended meaning. I'll go further and say that the original sentence IS meant to convey the intended meaning.

This SC 'myth' comes from the Official Guide. These are the relevant sentences from the 2021 Official Guide:
Sentence Correction questions present a statement in which words are underlined. The questions ask you to select the best expression of the idea or relationship described in the underlined section from the answer options.

So the OG says tells us that we need to select the answer with the best expression of the idea or relationship in (A). The 'idea or relationship' comes from (A); we may change the expression of that idea or relationship.

The original sentence is usually phrased badly (usually = in about 80% of questions). Sometimes the phrasing is so clunky that the literal meaning is illogical or significantly different from what the writer must have intended. The correct answer often changes the literal meaning to the intended meaning, or to something that at least makes sense.

Yes, choice (A) must be evaluated to the same standards of grammar and precision and clarity as the other choices. And Choice (A) certainly does not set any standard for sentence structure. The right answer must always be grammatical and logical, and usually there is only one such answer. (So this discussion is usually not relevant at all!)

But if we think of SC as a proof-reading or editing task, as suggested by the name 'Sentence Correction', then (A) is the original sentence that someone wrote. It is from (A) that we learn what the writer was trying to say.

Posted from my mobile device

Hi vv65.

As becomes rather obvious when we read the verbal explanations in the Official guide, the Official Guide is written by people who neither fully grasp sentence construction concepts nor fully understand Sentence Correction. With that awareness, we can safely decide not to follow in the manner you have outlined that ambiguous directive you cited.

The truth is that there is nothing special about the original version of the sentence and that any of the five choices in a Sentence Correction question would serve just as well as choice (A) in the original version.

In fact, what you said, "Sometimes the phrasing (of the original version) is so clunky that the literal meaning is illogical or significantly different from what the writer must have intended. The correct answer often changes the literal meaning to the intended meaning, or to something that at least makes sense," means that seeking to preserve the meaning of the original version of the sentence does not make sense.

So, while we could spend time seeking to decipher the intended meaning of a sentence by reading the original version, there's no reason to do so since the correct version will effectively convey a logical meaning, which, by default, will be the intended meaning of the sentence.

Neither I nor vv65 made the claim that one should seek to preserve the meaning of the original version of the sentence, MartyTargetTestPrep.
I disagree, for the reason that I mentioned in my previous comment:
The author of the sentence had a particular insight that he or she decided to share with the world, and if we can infer his or her intent, we can often eliminate some answer choices that fail to convey that intent.

From what vv65 said, it sounds as if she does emphasize analysis of the original version, though I agree that she didn't say that we should preserve the meaning of that version.

Meanwhile, here's what I don't get.

Why can't we just eliminate those choices because the sentence versions created with them they fail to effectively convey ANY logical meaning?

After all, if they effectively conveyed a logical meaning, then they would be correct. Right? So, if two versions of the sentence effectively conveyed logical meanings, then they would both be correct, in which case the question would be busted because there would be two intended meanings.

So, there must be just one version that effectively conveys, or at least most effectively conveys, a logical meaning, meaning that all we have to do to get an SC question correct is eliminate the choices that produce versions that don't effectively convey logical meanings, or that least effectively convey logical meanings when there is no good version.

This argument reminds me a lot of the disagreement we recently had on pre-thinking, MartyTargetTestPrep. In my experience, it's a lot more efficient to figure out ahead of time (before diving into answer choices BCDE) the point that the author was attempting to make, so that answer choices that mess that up can be immediately eliminated (without having to consider whether each of them does or does not convey some meaning that may or may not be logical).

Yes, I agree that it's a similar discussion, and similarly, I can't imagine taking the time to consider what the sentence is meant to convey.

The explanations are written by people who don't understand SC. But that can't be true of the Preface: I assume, or rather hope, that the preface is written by someone who does know SC.

GMAT instructors may attend GMAC Knowledge Refresher sessions; test takers don't. Test-takers should be able to depend on the Official Guide, and it cannot say things that are not true.

(Explanations are different: they are the routes to the answer, and there can be multiple routes, some better and some worse.)

But I guess this discussion is academic.
'Proceed as if (A) is no different from the other answers' is a process that would work.

After all, you have a 800-score and it worked for you


Posted from my mobile device

I agree with Marty because if we were to take a sentence in SC 'literally' then only 1, in some rare cases 2, conveys a logical meaning concisely. Now those 2 sentences can include or not include option A. So, logically then, obsessing over option A or giving it some special attention could be argued as a waste of time.

Posted from my mobile device

It's been more than ten years since I've heard anyone claim that answer A in SC conveys some special meaning we need to preserve, so I'm not sure who this "tip" is even for. And if all this "tip" was saying was that answer A is not special in SC, I'd think that's already well understood, but I wouldn't otherwise have an issue with it. But that's not what this "tip" says. It says answer A does not convey the intended meaning of the sentence. And that's plainly false, and one need only look at two or three official SC questions to see that. It's a very rare SC question where you can't guess a sentence's intended meaning from answer A, if you ignore its grammatical errors or other issues.

Here, you are both making the same basic logical error:



Because the right answer effectively conveys a logical meaning, you're both concluding that the wrong answers do not effectively convey a logical meaning. That's not the correct negation. The wrong answers are more often wrong because they do not effectively convey a logical meaning; they may convey a logical meaning, but could be more precise, more concise, more grammatical, more idiomatic, less ambiguous, etc. If our only criterion when answering SC questions was "can we guess what this sentence is trying to say?" (ignoring grammatical errors, misplaced modifiers, and so on) then answer A would be the right answer to almost every question (and so would almost every other choice).

Answer A is not special, and taken purely literally, is often nonsensical, but it also almost always conveys the intended meaning of the sentence, exactly as GMAC's own description of the SC question type says it does (as vv65 quotes above).

But this is the only reason I replied:


Of course test takers should be thinking about what the sentence means to convey, because what else should they be doing when reading the original sentence? If you can tell what the sentence is trying to say, you can learn a lot about what the right answer will look like, and that lets you do SC more accurately and more quickly. So if you're advising test takers not to think about the sentence's intended meaning when first reading an SC question, I think that's just bad advice.

Here's what GMAC says in OG 2020 (that's the latest version I have) on Page #775:

Given that all Sentence Correction questions are presented out of context, there may be no basis for certainty about which of several possible interpretations the writer intended to convey. You will not be given multiple equally good versions of a sentence and asked to guess which one accurately represents the writer’s true intention.

I believe that if we can always understand the intended meaning of a sentence, irrespective of how distorted it is, the whole purpose of grammar is lost! I believe grammar exists so that we can all derive the same meaning from a particular order of a particular bunch of words. If we can derive the same meaning even from distorted versions of the sentences, what purpose does grammar serve?

- CJ

This is a bit of a philosophical discussion, but if you look at the historical evolution of grammar, you'll see it does not have that purpose, and that grammar develops because of historical circumstance and convention. A lot of grammar prescriptions arose because of the reverence early English usage writers had for Latin. That's where rules like "don't split an infinitive" and "don't end a sentence with a preposition" come from -- those are impossible to do in Latin, so some people thought we shouldn't do those things in English either. But those 'rules' make it harder, not easier, to express meaning precisely. And you can see that we don't need to adhere to grammar rules to convey meaning just by looking at how language is used in practice. We rarely observe grammar rules in conversation, but we are perfectly able to communicate. People who don't know "grammar" have no difficulty expressing themselves clearly. If a baseball player says "I ain't playing good today", there is no question what she means, even if some grammarians would object to her syntax. And that's not to even mention the ideological functions of grammar that are studied in sociolinguistics.

But while I don't agree entirely with your philosophical point, I was saying something empirical, not theoretical. If we accept the OG as an authority, we need to reconcile what you quote with what vv65 quoted earlier: The questions ask you to select the best expression of the idea or relationship described in the underlined section from the answer options. In that context, I take your quote to mean "the literal meaning of answer A is not special, and does not need to be preserved". We can all agree about that. But it's a very rare official question where, after reading the original sentence, the meaning of the correct answer comes as any surprise. The meaning you'd guess the sentence is trying to convey, reading an incorrect answer A, is the meaning you find, better expressed, in the right answer. That's easy to confirm just by looking at a handful of official questions (I did just that; looking at 20 questions in a row in the VR book where A was wrong, the meaning I guessed was intended by A was the meaning in the correct answer). We can almost always infer from answer A an SC question's intended meaning.