What are the strategies for long SC questions?

Hi Delmoneyy.

There isn't really any trick that will work for finding the correct answer to any kind of SC question, whether the underlined portion is long or short. GMAT SC questions are pretty sophisticated, and they are designed so that answering them by using tricks doesn't really work.

I can give you some tips though.

One move that often helps is to read all of the choices. You can often get insights from one choice that help you to see why another is wrong. So, for instance, you may not be sure whether choice (C) is correct, but some part of choice (C) will tip you off to the fact that choice (B) is definitely not correct. So, read the choices and notice how they differ. These differences can tip you off to errors.

Another thing you can do is look for easy outs. Usually one or more choices will contain relatively obvious errors. Generally each long choice will contain more than one error. In any case, look for the easiest choices to eliminate - they will contain clear errors, such as modifier errors, subjects and verbs that don't agree, or flawed comparisons - to clear the decks a bit and clear your mind. By whittling your choices down to even three choices, you can make things much clearer.

Often long choices will have issues that involve the beginnings and ends of the choices. Something at the beginning that seems OK will not work with something at the end of the choice. So, you have to read the choice as a whole, and not just focus on small parts of it or on details like subject-verb agreement. Modifiers at the ends of choices may not work with subjects at the beginnings of choices. Pronouns at the ends of choices may not logically refer to anything that precedes them. The meaning of a choice may seem to make sense if you read just the beginning or just the end of the choice, but will not make sense if you read the entire choice.

Remember to consider the non-underlined portions along with the choices. Sometimes a choice that you are having a hard time eliminating will become obviously wrong once you consider it along with the non-underlined portion.

Overall, Sentence Correction is a test of vision. So, you have to train yourself to see what there is to see in the questions. Doing so can take a lot of untimed practice. So, don't be surprised if at first you have a tough time with SC questions that have long choices. Just take your time when practicing, and train yourself to find what needs to be found in order for you to differentiate between choices, by spending as much time as necessary to see what there is to see in each practice question, even if doing so means spending ten minutes or more on each question. As you develop an eye for the issues, you will speed up and learn to answer them correctly much faster.