5 GMAT Grammar Mistakes We All Make
Music and the GMAT
Before we talk about grammar, let’s talk about music. Trust me. I’ll bring it back.
When I turned 30, I started taking piano lessons. Beyond a vague recollection of butchering “Hot Cross Buns” on a plastic recorder in third grade, I’d never had any musical training whatsoever. I quickly discovered that music isn’t just about pressing buttons at the right time to make the notes come out; it’s also about learning to listen for rhythms, harmonies, and intervals between notes. When you learn to notice these things, you start hearing them everywhere and wondering how you ever missed them. Better yet, you start to notice your own musical successes and mistakes before someone else points them out to you.
But here’s the challenge: how do you listen for a note out of place if you never had 4/4 time signature ingrained in your skull to begin with? My piano teacher will tell you that it’s simple – that you need to start with a metronome and listen to it tick so closely that its relentless tick follows you around even when you sleep. Okay, okay, he didn’t say it quite like that, but still…
Let’s bring it back to the test at hand. In any GMAT course I’ve taught, it’s only a matter of time before I have students say something like: “That choice doesn’t sound right,” or “I like the way that one feels.” Such students are using their “ear” the same way a musician does, instinctively sensing when something is off or not. This comes up throughout the test, but I sense it most acutely when we work on sentence correction questions (the ones where you fix the badly written sentences).
If there were such a thing as a “grammar metronome” it would be an incredibly helpful tool for spotting these missed beats. But English isn’t so regular. And you often can’t get by just by picking whichever choice “sounds best.” When the questions get tougher, all the sentences might sound terrible. Worse yet, the shortest, snappiest choice might be the most egregiously wrong. Therein lies the challenge: how do we train our ears to spot the mistakes that come up time and time again on the GMAT?
In the remainder of this blog entry, we will work to develop that “grammar metronome” by examining five grammar rules that none of us follow anyway – at least in conversational English. Unless you spend all day hanging out with that annoying guy who refuses to end a sentence in a preposition, you likely hear these rules violated just about as often as you hear them followed. In fact, each of the bold statements below contains a mistake. Try to spot them before I point them out to you.
Common GMAT Grammar Mistake #1: I often misuse this word, which leads me to believe that you might too.
I’ve already committed one grave error. Unless you’re deep into your GMAT studies, I bet you missed it. In the sentence above, examine the word “which.” What does it refer to? The word “which” is a pronoun. It needs to refer to a thing – a noun. I challenge you to find that noun in the sentence above.
It’s not “I.” It’s not “word.” Neither of those on its own would lead me to believe that you too are a grammar-rule-flouter. It’s a bigger idea, my misuse of the word, that makes me think you break the rule as well.
To fix this one, give “which” something to refer to or eliminate it entirely:
“I often misuse this word, leading me to think that you might too.”
“I often misuse this word, which you probably misuse too.”
Common GMAT Grammar Mistake #2: Almost unnoticeable, I hear this mistake made all the time in conversation.
Found it?
That first phrase – “almost unnoticeable” is a description – an “opening modifier” in GMAT lingo. What is it describing?
Presumably, I meant it to describe the mistake. It’s the mistake that’s unnoticeable. That said, the placement of the phrase is important. Unfortunately, it’s closest to the word “I.” If “I” were unnoticeable, I’d make a great cat burglar. This sentence isn’t about me sneaking about through the night thieving valuables, though. It’s about a mistake that’s hard to notice.
To fix this one, place the noun to be modified right next to the opening modifier:
“Almost unnoticeable, this mistake crops up often in conversation.”
Common GMAT Grammar Mistake #3: Being a common error, this one might slip past you too.
How’s that ear training going? Did you take a second to look for this one before I point it out to you?
“Being” is a problematic word on the GMAT. Whenever I see it, my ears perk up in anticipation of something awry. This doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a mistake, it just cues me to look for one. Here’s the problem with “being” in this instance. It’s unnecessary. If a word does not contribute to the sentence in any way, get rid of it.
In the olden days, some instructors supposedly told their students to hunt for any instance of the word “being” and cross out any answer choice that used it. I really doubt anyone gave such overreaching advice, but whatever the case, don’t go to this extreme. There are plenty of instances in which the GMAT question-writers use this word correctly. Like a note out of key or played on an off-beat, it might just be part of the music. The problem is when it’s unnecessary.
The sentence works just fine without “being,” so cut it out:
“A common error, this one might slip past you too.”
Common GMAT Grammar Mistake #4: Do like I do, and you’ll be butchering your comparisons.
As the sentence states, this one has to do with a botched comparison. If you need a hint, think about this popular (and correctly written) phrase:
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
Do you notice the difference between that phrase and the one in the bold sentence above it? I used the word “like” instead of the word “as.” This rule is simple: “like” compares two things, “as” compares two actions.
To fix this sentence, then, we have a couple of options:
“Do as I do, and you’ll be butchering your comparisons.”
“Write sentences like this one, and you’ll be butchering your comparisons.”
Common GMAT Grammar Mistake #5: Adjectives and adverbs sometimes have similar forms that we use interchangeable.
The sentence itself is another good hint here. Do you spot an adjective that should be an adverb? Both words are modifiers – they describe something else in the sentence. Adjectives describe nouns. Adverbs describe verbs and some other stuff. In this sentence, the adjective “interchangeable” should be an adverb. “Interchangeably” describes the way we use the words, not the words themselves.
This error might seem simple enough here, but there are numerous examples in English where adjectives and adverbs are so similar that they do in fact seem to be interchangeable:
Bad & Badly
Interchangeable & Interchangeably
Slower & More slowly
Such words are often mistakenly swapped in conversational English. In the GMAT, they come up often in comparison questions too.
To fix this one, you’ve again got a couple of options:
“Adjectives and adverbs sometimes have similar forms that we use interchangeably.”
“Adjectives and adverbs sometimes have seemingly interchangeable forms that we use mistakenly.”
Retrain your Ear
Knowing your grammar is a crucial piece of GMAT mastery. No, you won’t ever have to conjugate a verb, identify a gerund, or label the independent and dependent clauses in a sentence. Regardless, you do need to know the rules well enough to spot the good grammar and cross out the bad. When you’re writing emails, surfing your news feed, or chatting with your friends, take a moment to notice the grammar. If you start spotting these mistakes “in the wild,” so to speak, your ears will learn to perk up whenever you see them. If you train your ears, you’ll spot them quickly on the GMAT, where seconds are precious and you want every point you can get.\
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Tom Anderson is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in New York, NY. He has a B.A. in English and an M.S. in education. Tom started his teaching career as a New York City Teaching Fellow and is currently a Math for America Fellow. Outside of teaching the GRE and the GMAT, he is an avid runner who once (very unexpectedly) won a marathon. Check our Tom’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.