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kivalo
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Why do we need sentence correction? 28 Apr 2017, 16:52
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No, I'm not going to hate the SC question type here :P I want to share with you text I found that confirmed something I felt about SC while practicing it: knowing grammar rules very well can not only improve your verbal score, but also improve your overall comprehension, and even writing or speaking skills. The reason for this is simple - knowing precisely how grammar structures helps you to form precise sentences and express yourself more clearly. Of course, I am not talking about strictly following the rules (a lot of them are only for gmat), but about applying the core principles. I find them (principles :lol: ) very useful!

Anyway, here is the text I wanted to share to prove that GMAC didn't invent rules to torture us. Donald McCloskey wrote in 1987 "Economical writing", a text on writing well in economics. The text includes a number of very useful rules, and many of them seem as if they were written for GMAT. That's why I'm posting them here:
...
Quote:

" The care extends to tiny details. For instance, you must choose repeatedly whether to carry over words from one construction to its parallel. It’s either “the beautiful and the damned” or “the beautiful and damned.” Such choices will occur hundreds of times in a paper if written in lucid parallels. Fitzgerald, seeking elegant variation, could have written “the beautiful folks and those people who are damned,” in which case the choice would not have been posed, and you would probably never have heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Other tools to line up word and thing are singulars and plurals, masculines and feminines. Unlike the inflected Latin and Anglo- Saxon from which it descends, English does not have cases and gender to keep related words hitched. Make use of what paltry resources we have. The following sentence, for example, is ambiguous because “them” can refer to so many things: “Owners of the original and indestructible powers of the soil earned from them [powers or owners?] pure rents, and that tenant farmers were willing to pay them [the rents? the owners? the powers?] indicates that these powers of the soil were useful.” The singular and plurals here are not essential to the meaning, and so they can be exploited to make it clear: “An owner of the ‘original and indestructible powers of the soil’ earned from them [now unambiguous because it agrees with the only plural referent available: the powers] pure rents, and that the tenant farmers were willing to pay him [unambiguous: the owner] indicates that these powers of the soil were useful.” The use of “she” alongside “he” can in like fashion become an advantage for clarity of reference as much as a blow for sexual equality. "
....

"The inflected languages have more freedom of order than English. Homo canem mordet means the same thing as canem mordet homo, with only a difference of emphasis, but “man bites dog” and “dog bites man” are news items of different sorts. Yet much can be done with the order of an English sentence. With the order of an English sentence much can be done. It’s mainly a matter of ear: proper words in proper places. Tinker with the sentence until it works. The problems come with modifiers, especially with adverbs, which are free floating in English. The phrase “which is again merely another notation for ...” should be “which again is merely another notation for ... ” Moving the “again” prevents it from piling up against the other modifier. Or: “the elasticities are both with respect to the price” should be “both elasticities are with respect to the price.”
You should cultivate the habit of mentally rearranging the order of words and phrases of every sentence you write. Rules, as usual, govern the rewriting.
...
In revision the trick is to delete any comma before “the,” as I just did after “In revision”: the “the” signals a new phrase quite well enough without the clunk of a comma. "
...
"Rearrangement serve grace as well as clarity."
...
"Use Verbs, Active Ones:
You should make sentences that hit the target in the middle. Write therefore with nouns and, especially, verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. Carry a rifle. In revision the adjectives and adverbs should be the first to go"
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If you like the quotes, find the text. Nerdy stuff!

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Why do we need sentence correction? 01 May 2017, 10:34
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Great! I often wondered this question. Why SC for business school? Then i started paying attention to my writing in emails, memos and realized how many mistakes i was making... When i am sending emails to superiors and clients, i need to make sure i make the emails as clear and concise as possible. Grammar mistakes and silly pronoun errors can change the meaning and distort the meaning of the sentence.... so SC is useful.

Thanks for the text above.
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Why do we need sentence correction? 01 May 2017, 14:53
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Thanks for the feedback :)
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Why do we need sentence correction? 02 May 2017, 10:21
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I like it, kivalo! I think you're hitting on one of the holy grails of GMAT prep: if you can get something useful out of the whole process (other than a GMAT score, of course), you win.

I'm not crazy about some of the specifics of GMAT SC, since a lot of the rules they choose to test seem arbitrary to me. But the overall process of thinking carefully about meaning and clarity and concision? I think that's a really good thing that can make all of us better in our communication. :)

Thank you for posting this!

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