The beauty of Sentence Correction on the GMAT is that it’s one of the easiest places to increase your score rapidly.
In fact, you can make a huge amount of progress in a relatively short amount of time.
The best thing about GMAT Sentence Correction, however, is that there’s something for everyone.
It’s pretty rare for me to meet a client who doesn’t have at least some low-hanging fruit in Sentence Correction.
Whether you’re a native English speaker who’s too cocky about your own grammar abilities or you’re a non-native who’s worried that your English grammar isn’t at a sufficient level to succeed at GMAT Sentence Correction, this page will have some resources to help you out.
Let’s start with the Native English Speaker and GMAT Sentence Correction
- If this isn’t you, you can skip to the next section.
- If you’re not a native speaker but are highly fluent-to-bilingual, this is for you as well.
Native English Speakers have traditionally been the bread and butter of the GMAT. The test is nearly 70 years old, and for most of that time it was isolated to the United States, where English–or some strange offshoot of it–is the dominant language.
Of course for most of this time, the majority of the people taking the GMAT were born and raised speaking English. This landscape has of course shifted dramatically in recent decades to where a substantial proportion of GMAT-takers are not in fact native English speakers.
What, even, is the point of making this distinction?
Simple: Native Speakers tend to say things like “I’ve been speaking this language my entire life and I understand how grammar works” (while then saying crap like “That wouldn’t be true for her and I.” Right).
Native Speakers don’t tend to realize that there are actually many grammar errors baked into the way that we normally speak, and the GMAT loves to punish people for glossing over such errors.
Remember, what “sounds good,” or worse, “sounds normal” has little to do with what is correctly written.
The advantage that native speakers have is that some reasonably complex, difficult, idiomatic, or otherwise arbitrary constructions (e.g. subjunctive, negative limiters, etc.) can sound just fine to the ear where they might sound wildly incorrect to the non-native.
GMAT Sentence Correction Tips for Non-Native Speakers
One does not have to be a stellar English speaker to do well on GMAT Sentence Correction. I mean that probably helps, but it’s no excuse that has any reason to hold you back.
Rather, non-natives have a huge advantage with GMAT Sentence Correction because you have actually learned English from books. You have had to study grammar at some point in the past, and that means that you actually have some idea of how English grammar works.
And let’s be honest: most of us native speakers really don’t have the first bloody clue about how English grammar actually functions: we just do it, holding our noses and hoping for the best.
SO… what to make of this?
The analytical side of English is something that doesn’t come easily to native speakers, so being able to break down and understand a sentence by its constituent parts is something where book learning can be helpful.
In my experience, most people whose English is sufficient to consider taking the GMAT in the first place have sufficient English skills to do well on GMAT Sentence Correction. The problem mostly lies with mindset: essentially, if you think you can’t do it, you’ll find reasons to support that hypothesis.
In other words, it’s a good excuse if you want to confirm to yourself why you’ll never succeed–but it’s not valid. In fact, anecdotally, many of my top SC students have been non-native speakers.
There might be a few tricky rules to learn, but GMAT Sentence Correction is a largely analytical process and is eminently learnable.
GMAT Sentence Correction Tips That are Common to Everyone
There are a lot of things that look funny as you learn GMAT Sentence Correction tips, many of which aren’t necessarily in standard grammar textbooks.
Sure, your basics such as sentence structure, verb tense, and all those sorts of things are pure grammar, but a lot of what is considered “GMAT grammar” is either stuff that is idiomatic, such as phrasal verbs and noun-preposition combinations, or it is stuff that the GMAT simply doesn’t like, such as excessive pronouns, nominalization, or redundancy.
At the end of the day, the most important thing for you to focus on is how you can best answer the question at hand: what that means is looking at the sentence through different lenses or filters.
The Filtering System to Beat GMAT Sentence Correction
Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is to use different reasons to eliminate different answer choices.
I suggest that when you go through answers in practice (and even in the test if you feel like that would be helpful), you make a quick note about WHY you think the incorrect answer is incorrect.
The way to do this is to think about the general reasons that something might be incorrect, or to apply different “filters” to your SC work.
In principle, what you’re looking for, then is to apply the individual filters one after the other until you have cross-applied enough filters that only one answer choice remains. In practice, admittedly, it’s not always that easy.
GMAT Grammar Tips in Action: the “Big 10” Filters that I use:
- Sentence Structure
- Verb Structure
- Pronoun Structure
- Comparison Structure
- Modifier Structure
- Verb Tenses
- Parallelism
- GMAT Idiom
- Redundancy
- Stuff GMAT Hates
This is of course an imperfect science, and there may be more things to discuss than these, but it’s a reasonable start.
Let’s start our GMAT Grammar Tips Filters section with Sentence Structure.
GMAT Grammar Tips — Filter #1: Sentence Structure
This one might be straightforward or it might not.
First, do you have a complete sentence with a subject and verb? Usually what I try to do is isolate the simplest functional sentence within a more complex sentence. I call this the Core Sentence.
Surprisingly, perhaps, what you’ll notice is that in many cases, the incorrect answer choices do not have a functional core sentence.
Look at this example (INCORRECT):
Although appearing less appetizing than most of their round and red supermarket cousins, heirloom tomatoes, grown from seeds saved during the previous year—they are often green and striped, or have plenty of bumps and bruises—heirlooms are more flavorful and thus in increasing demand.
Core sentence:
Although appearing less appetizing than most of their round and red supermarket cousins, heirloom tomatoes, grown from seeds saved during the previous year—they are often green and striped, or have plenty of bumps and bruises—heirlooms are more flavorful and thus in increasing demand.
This is clearly nonsense–note how we need the first “heirloom tomatoes” simply so we know what we are talking about, but it’s actually within parenthetical commas; this creates the problem of “heirloom tomatoes–heirlooms” when we look at the Core Sentence.
HOWEVER, when we look at the correct answer from among the answer choices, notice that that the Core Sentence is absolutely functional.
Example (CORRECT):
Although heirloom tomatoes, grown from seeds saved during the previous year, appear less appetizing than most of their round and red supermarket cousins—they are often green and striped, or have plenty of bumps and bruises—heirlooms are more flavorful and thus in increasing demand.
Make sure you’re using your commas and semicolons correctly. If you don’t know how to use a semicolon, then you don’t know how to use a period (full-stop). The test is that if you could fit a period in this place, it must be a semicolon rather than a comma.
Past this, there isn’t much more to Sentence Structure.
GMAT Grammar Tips: Filter #2 — Verb Structure for GMAT Sentence Correction:
When I talk about Verb Structure, I simply mean “are the verbs all conjugated correctly?” This happens a lot less often than it might seem.
The easiest way to do this is–surprise, surprise–to strip everything back to the Core Sentence and then to check whether the subject and the verb correspond appropriately.
*Just as a quick review, so that we are on the same page: every English sentence needs to have a subject (noun–a thing word) and a verb (an action word).* Other than that, we can leave out most terminology here because it’s basically useless for the purposes of Sentence Correction. One of the favorite tricks of the GMAT is to place a plural noun that isn’t the subject right next to a verb conjugated in the plural. However, in the case that the subject is actually meant to be singular, this will obviously cause problems. That’s not to say that this is the only way that the GMAT will monkey with verb structure, but it’s an extremely common one. Let’s take a look:
Excavators at the Indus Valley site of Harappa in eastern Pakistan say the discovery of inscribed shards dating to circa 2800–2600 B.C. indicate their development of a Harappan writing system…
In this excerpt, if we outline the core sentence we can already see the problem:
Excavators at the Indus Valley site of Harappa in eastern Pakistan say the discovery of inscribed shards dating to circa 2800–2600 B.C. indicate their development of a Harappan writing system…
At this point, you’ll notice a couple of things: first, it should read “excavators say” and “discovery indicates,” which is definitely our verb problem. (Then there’s the problem of “their development,” but that’s for another section. You might also note that the GMAT only takes “indicate(s) that,” which is also for another section.)
Let’s look at how the correct answer reads:
Excavators at the Indus Valley site of Harappa in eastern Pakistan say the discovery of inscribed shards dating to circa 2800–2600 B.C. indicates that the development of a Harappan writing system…
You’ll see all the aforementioned problems cleared up, but it all started by recognizing that the verb “indicates (that)” is conjugated to the singular “discovery.”
GMAT Sentence Correction Tips: Filter #3 — Pronoun Structure
When I say “pronoun structure,” it might seem that you’re simply doing something like we did with the verbs and just sure that the pronouns all fit with their antecedents. That might be true, of course, to some degree: if you’re talking about a singular subject you use a singular pronoun and if you’re talking about a plural subject you use a plural noun, etc. That sort of thing is pretty obvious but it’s also pretty common. Let’s look at an example:
The only way for growers to salvage frozen citrus is to process them quickly into juice concentrate before they rot when warmer weather returns.
You can see here, of course, that “citrus” is singular and therefore “them” is incorrect. The correct response reads:
The only way for growers to salvage frozen citrus is to have it quickly processed into juice concentrate before warmer weather returns and rots the fruit.
This of course uses the correct singular pronoun “it.”
However, that’s not really the most important thing with pronouns. What is the most important thing about pronouns, you ask?
Put simply, the GMAT hates pronouns.
If there is any way to get rid of a pronoun–the only realistic exception to this seems to be the situation where all the answer choices have pronouns–what we need to worry about is how to eliminate the pronouns.
What you’ll notice is that if you’re vicious about eliminating it, they, and often which, in the vast majority of cases you’ll succeed in eliminating three of the incorrect answers (and occasionally four).
The method: give preference to answers without pronouns. Don’t get your underwear in a twist: if these fail for some otherwise clear reason, you can go back to the ones with the shitty pronouns, I promise.
Let’s look at an example:
In 1995 Richard Stallman, a well-known critic of the patent system, testified in Patent Office hearings that, to test the system, a colleague of his had managed to win a patent for one of Kirchhoff’s laws, an observation about electric current first made in 1845 and now included in virtually every textbook of elementary physics.
(A) laws, an observation about electric current first made in 1845 and
Leave this one. Seems reasonable.
(B) laws, which was an observation about electric current first made in 1845 and it is
“It” is a pronoun. Put aside.
(C) laws, namely, it was an observation about electric current first made in 1845 and
“It” is a pronoun. Put aside.
(D) laws, an observation about electric current first made in 1845, it is
“It” is a pronoun. Put aside.
(E) laws that was an observation about electric current, first made in 1845, and is
No pronouns here; compare to (A).
Now we’re between (A) and (E). The rest of this isn’t about pronouns: you’ll notice that the modifier is just fine in (A) and the “that” is unnecessary in (E). That is, the information after the “that” is not essential to the core sentence Richard Stallman testified that a colleague had managed to win a patent for one of Kirchhoff’s laws. Given inessential information, just use a gerund-based modifier hanging off the end of the sentence as we see in (A). The point, however, is how I know to eliminate pronouns. See a pronoun that isn’t present in other sentences? Terminate with extreme prejudice.
Interested in more resources?
Here’s a page for ADVANCED GMAT SENTENCE CORRECTION SECRETS.
Here’s a book for basic GMAT Sentence Correction. Learn the rules first!
Last Minute GMAT Grammar eBook
