Help needed: Am I approaching SC practice the right way?

[Dienekes]

Hi
I have gone through the MGMAT SC strategy guide and practiced the OG questions a couple of times and still on CATs including MGMAT's and GMATPrep I am at an accuracy of approx. 70%, and more importantly even with the questions that I get right, while doing them I do not have confidence on my way of approaching them as I haphazardly try to figure out the grammar rules, visible meaning changers and basing on intuition.

So in order to improve my grasp, confidence and understand the way SC questions should be solved I am trying to follow the study approach suggested by Ron in the "November 18, 2010: Sentence Correction: A New Way to Study Sentence Correction" video.
I started with Meaning in the first drill as it seems to be an area I often overlook and for same I am doing alternate questions in a set of 10 from the Official Guide. I am also referencing Stacey's blog post from 2011 that lists all meaning based errors from OG in order to see if I am figuring all of those or not.
Surprisingly what I am finding out is that for some questions that are not on that list I am still able to eliminate certain choices based on either the meaning or other grammar rules that indirectly seem evident based on the meaning, as an example in Q#38 (OG 13th edition) I was able to eliminate A, C and E as they seem to have modifier issues and thereby altering the meaning of the original sentence.

My questions are:
1. Am I doing this the right way, in eliminating choices that aren't directly based on meaning but do surface because of that?
2. Also, while doing these drills I am neither checking the final answer nor reading the OG/online explanations as I understand from the session that the goal is just to make one understand and identify the particular problem area (such as meaning, modifiers, //ism, etc.), is that fine or should I be reviewing the explanations too.

Thanks for the guidance!

[StaceyKoprince]

Yes, I love that - meaning and grammar are intertwined in many places, and it's arguable sometimes whether you should call it meaning or grammar. Sometimes, it's kind of both! You definitely want to be thinking about both, and it sounds like you are now doing that.

I think it can be valuable to check our (MGMAT's) explanation afterwards, just to see if what you understood is also what we're saying in the explanation. I wouldn't check the official explanation - that's not really going to help. Do you have access to our GMAT Navigator program? It contains written explanations for every OG13 / OG2015 SC question (and maybe half of them also have video explanations). It is not a free program though - you may have access if you're taking one of our classes or self-study programs; alternatively, you can buy access to the program (which will also give you quant explanations and a bunch of other features).

Also, have you looked at this?
http://tinyurl.com/scprocess

And this:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/inde ... st-glance/

I think that stuff would really help you with your reported problem of not entirely knowing what to do or what to do next (the "haphazard" method). :) Try that stuff out and let me know what you think.