Sentence Correction- General Strategy

[Guest]

Hi,

Is there a specific order as to which grammer rules I should look for when attempting Sentence Correction questions? I know to look for splits between sentences, but im not sure what to look for first, ie parallelism, modifiers, subject/verb agreement etc. Any general advice would be much appreciated.

thanks

[Guest]

what is the meaning of life ? ;-) would be an easier question!

[CKC]

I think there is no one way to correct a sentence so you should not try to attack the sentence re-writing on your own words. If you see the fault from the very first sight, go and find the choise you think is right. However, if you are not sure what to look for, the best practice might be the elimination process. So go and read the choises, they should give you a better idea about whether it is an idiom or a parallelism or a whateverism problem. :idea:

[StaceyKoprince]

Yep - you don't know what might be going on in any particular sentence, and you don't want to cycle through all of the grammar rules on every question. It would take too long!

Here's the process:
Read the original sentence all the way through.
If you happen to spot anything problematic, examine. If it's an error, cross off A. Then cross off any others that repeat the same error.
Repeat the above until you've dealt with everything you happened to see on your first read-through (note: sometimes you won't see anything on the first read-through!).
If you've exhausted the original sentence, do a vertical scan of the first word of each choice. If you can identify the potential error based on the differences you see, deal with it. If not, do a vertical scan of the last word of each choice - same thing. After that, do a vertical scan starting at the beginning of each choice.
If you notice a difference when scanning but you don't know what error that different might signify, keep going - look for a different split.

If you've dealt with everything you know how to deal with and you still have more than one choice left, pick something and move on. Don't agonize over it - just pick and go.

A useful study exercise is to take a file or notebook and make two columns. On the left-hand side, write down the name of a particular grammar error (eg, subj-verb agreement). On the right-hand side, write down what the splits tend to look like for that type of error (eg, nouns that sometimes include "s" and sometimes don't; verbs that sometimes include "s" and sometimes don't). This will help you to study how to spot certain types of errors - when you see certain differences in the splits, that will trigger you to examine for certain types of errors.

[abhishek.pitti]

Excellent Stacey.
This has been the most realistic approach I have seen so far to crack SC in 90 secs. I was partially doing that but you gave a good approach.

Thank you,

Abhi

[JonathanSchneider]

: )