How to Review a Sentence Correction Question

by Chelsey Cooley Oct 3, 2019

I’ve often heard that studying GMAT Verbal feels less straightforward than studying Quant. Even though Quant is tough, it does have a lot of clear rules and techniques to memorize. Verbal, on the other hand, feels much fuzzier. But is that really the case? 

Start by reading this article, which investigates whether GMAT Verbal questions are “fair.” Once you’re thinking methodically about the rules of GMAT Verbal, come back to this article to learn how to deep dive a Sentence Correction problem.

Which Sentence Correction questions should I review? 

Ideally, you’d review every problem you do. But you don’t have to go through the whole process in this article every single time. The most important Sentence Correction problems to review are ones that fall into these categories: 

• Problems that were just a bit above your level. For instance, problems that you spent too much time on, but got right in the end, or problems that you missed, but at least partially understood. 
• Problems that you missed, spent too much time on, or weren’t confident about. 
• Problems that test concepts you’ve already studied, but missed. 

That means it’s not as important to review these problems:

• Anything you got right quickly and with confidence. (Review them anyways if you have time!)
• The very hardest problems: the ones you didn’t get at all. Hold on to these until they’re closer to your level. 
• Concepts you haven’t started studying yet. 

It’s great to (briefly!) review these things if you have time, but they aren’t as valuable as the ones listed above.

Reviewing Sentence Correction Problems

Once you’ve decided to review a Sentence Correction question, commit to reviewing it at least twice. When you review for the first time, do it shortly after originally doing the problem — for instance, on the following day. 

As with any type of problem, the first step is to redo the problem. Take it easy this time! Don’t use a timer. Your goal right now is to dig into the problem and reflect. You can even look up the grammar rules in the All the Verbal guide while you’re trying to figure it out.

If you got the problem wrong the first time, you have a specific task to do at this point. Look at what the right answer was, but don’t look at the explanation at all just yet. Instead, try to figure out on your own why the right answer was right. It’s fine if you have to guess why it was right. If you think about it on your own before reading the explanation, you’re far more likely to remember the explanation long-term. 

If you really get stuck, glance at the explanation, but try not to passively read the whole thing. For instance, you might glance at the explanation for just one of the answer choices at a time. 

Learning from a Sentence Correction problem

The next step is where the most valuable learning happens. It’s time to reflect on the problem in a methodical, organized way, and take notes that will help you later on.

Before we go further into the process, let’s do a Sentence Correction problem from GMATPrep as an example:

Displays of the aurora borealis, or “northern lights,” can heat the atmosphere over the arctic enough to affect the trajectories of ballistic missiles, induce electric currents that can cause blackouts in some areas and corrosion in north-south pipelines.

• (A) to affect the trajectories of ballistic missiles, induce
• (B) that the trajectories of ballistic missiles are affected, induce
• (C) that it affects the trajectories of ballistic missiles, induces
• (D) that the trajectories of ballistic missiles are affected and induces
• (E) to affect the trajectories of ballistic missiles and induce

Try this problem on your own before you keep reading. For the correct answer and a detailed solution of this problem, check out Stacey Koprince’s article here. I’m not going to explain the right answer in depth, since she already did a fantastic job of that — instead, I’ll show you how to take useful notes after you understand the answer. 

The Big Picture

Start by looking at the whole problem again, after redoing it. What major lessons are worth remembering? If you missed it, was there something about the problem you should have noticed? Here are some examples. 

Student A spent a long time solving this problem, because they spent 90 seconds going back and forth between the answer choices starting with “to” and the ones starting with “that.” In the end, they weren’t able to make a confident decision. Here are their brief big-picture notes:

• First split isn’t always the best, it’s okay to move on!

Student B missed this problem because they initially read the sentence as a list of three items: affect the trajectories, induce electric currents, and corrosion in north-south pipelines. (This mistake is described in more detail in the article linked above.) Here are their big-picture notes: 

• A sentence can have lists within lists (I ate pasta and bread and drank juice = okay) 
• Make sure the meaning makes sense, don’t just assume everything on a list goes together because it says “and” 

When you take these notes, emphasize anything new you learned from the problem, whether it was a new grammar rule, a misconception you had, or a mistake in your process. It’s fine to skip writing something down if it’s obvious to you! Focus on the things you may need to use later on.

Focusing on the splits

Next, zoom in on the differences among the answer choices. When you actually solve a Sentence Correction problem, you’ll do so one split at a time. For each split in the problem, make sure you can explain the following: 

• What the split is testing
• How you can know whether that issue is being tested in a problem 
• Anything you learned about that issue from solving this problem

For example, this problem is definitely testing Parallelism. Here are Student A’s notes. They spent too much time on this problem because they didn’t even notice the parallelism issue at first. However, once they noticed it, the right answer seemed pretty clear to them. 

Student A

• Issue: Parallelism
• How do you know? 
  • ANY time the sentence includes “and” !!
  • Commas are also a hint
  • Meaning: sentence describes more than one thing that the subject does
• Notes:
  • Two things that the subject does = make them match and put an “and” in between, not just a comma.
  • The aurora borealis is enough to AFFECT and INDUCE

Student B

Student B focused on the Parallelism issue right away, but they struggled to pick the right answer because they misunderstood the sentence structure. That’s what their notes focus on: 

• Issue: Parallelism
• How do you know? 
  • A list in the sentence
• Notes:
  • Don’t assume there can only be one “and”! You can have one list inside of another one.
  • Example: a normal list is X, Y, and Z. But a list can also look like “X and (Y and Z),” which has two ands.
  • Don’t eliminate an answer choice just for saying “and” twice until you check whether it actually has a list within a list.

Both of these students did a great job of focusing on simple, actionable, general lessons they could actually use on future problems. The next time Student A sees “and” in a Sentence Correction problem, they’ll start by looking for Parallelism, not by getting hung up on an issue they’re less sure about. And the next time Student B sees a problem like this one, they won’t immediately eliminate any answer that has two ands. Instead, they’ll check whether the sentence could make sense with a “list within a list” structure. (For more on the grammar of this sentence, check out the article mentioned earlier.) 

Next-level Sentence Correction review

Depending on your own strengths and weaknesses, you may or may not stop there. It’s great if you can just get one or two clear, actionable lessons out of each Sentence Correction problem you review. However, if Sentence Correction is a weakness for you, you may want to add more steps to your review process. For example, if you have a hard time finding the subject and verb of a complex sentence, you could try breaking the sentence down to its core every time you review a problem. If you’re struggling to remember the modifier rules, you could jot down each different type of modifier that appears in the sentence. 

It can also be helpful to jot down what caused you to miss a problem. This will help you notice patterns you may otherwise miss. Did you miss a problem because you skimmed over a small but critical word late in the sentence? Or because you picked the answer that “sounded okay” rather than the one that followed all of the grammar rules? Write it down! You could be making the same mistake more often than you realize.

Once you’ve taken some notes on the problem, set it aside for a week or two. If you’re using a GMAT study calendar, build in a review session once per week, and just redo old problems you’ve already tried. During this review session, go back to the Sentence Correction problems you’ve reviewed that week, and try them with a timer one more time. If you get them right this time and you’ve learned everything there is to learn from the problem, you can set them aside for now! If you miss a problem when you redo it in a week or two, though, you may have a weak area that needs some extra time and attention.

Want some more GMAT review tips? Check out these posts.

• How to Review a GMAT Critical Reasoning Problem
• How to Review a GMAT Data Sufficiency Problem
• How to Review a GMAT Reading Comprehension Question

Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

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Chelsey Cooley is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington. Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GMAT prep offerings here.