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.

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I’ll be honest, when I started studying for the GMAT, I couldn’t tell the difference between an adjective and a verb. If you asked what my biggest weakness was, I would absolutely have said “Grammar. I’m awful at it.” But I was wrong, and if you think you’re bad at grammar, there’s a good chance you are wrong too.

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GMAT Sentence Correction is all about grammar, but not every grammar rule is equally important. With these Sentence Correction tips, we’ll look at some of the most important—and most often overlooked—Sentence Correction techniques. Read more

Guess what? 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.

Our Founding Fathers are routinely lionized for their heroic war for independence and their ingenious creation of our Constitutional democracy.

But these boys also knew how to spit some verse. Read more

Did you know 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.

I promise you this will not be a diatribe directed towards the American school system, but I have to say that many of us were not taught proper grammar when we were in—ahem—grammar school. Many of us were also not taught how to make funny puns on blog posts. ? Read more

Did you know 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.

I was at a dinner party the other night and we started discussing the four uses of the word “that”. Apparently, I hang out with a lot of nerds at dinner. Not only did I impress these nerds with my grammar skills, but I also came up with a great idea for a blog post! So, from time to time, I’m going to write about some of the important GMAT grammar rules that I like to cover in my classes. Read more

Did you know 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.

It might be! And I’m not talking about the value of the top-10 MBA that your GMAT score might help you get—I’m talking about the knowledge that you gain from your GMAT studying. Check out this sentence: Read more

Did you know 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.

This is the first in what I hope will be many student-question inspired posts. Allyson from Philadelphia was wondering whether “nor” had to be paired with “neither” or whether it could be used on its own. The answer was far more complex than expected, so here it is. If you have an idea for a GMAT grammar blog post, or just have a question that you want answered, email me at emadan@manhattanprep.com.

To begin, you’ll need to understand the essentials of parallelism. You can get in-depth coverage of parallelism in our Sentence Correction Strategy Guide, but here are the basics. Two (or more) things in a list have to be both structural and logically parallel. Let’s start with the positive form: either/or. Read more

Did you know 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.

Subject-verb agreement is fundamental to correct sentence construction. It’s commonly tested on the GMAT, but is overlooked far too often. Today, we’re going to focus on the subject of the sentence in GMAT grammar.

The subject is the actor of the sentence. It performs the action described by the verb. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to use “subject” to mean the main subject of the sentence, used in an independent clause, though, of course, a sentence can contain multiple actors/subjects. For example: Read more

Did you know 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.

Last time, we talked about how to read for meaning and spot redundancy traps on GMAT Sentence Correction.

I’ve got another trappy SC for you; this one is from the GMATPrep® free exams. Go for it! Read more