Showing posts with label GMAT SC tipsm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GMAT SC tipsm. Show all posts

Saturday, August 29, 2009

GMAT sentence correction

Grammar, most think, is boring
But can anything be boring if it leads to your biggest dream? No, right?  So take a liking for grammar, usage, Standard English, correct English …whatever you call it.
Literate writing is grammatical. To express clearly and effectively- both oral and written- a functional knowledge of the rules and rudiments of English is necessary. You should be able to analyse a sentence, locate errors and modify the sentence. These skills are crucial to language testing in aptitude tests. How and where to use those rules-syntactical and semantic aspects- corresponding to word arrangement and intended meaning respectively-determine your success in grammar based questions.
Grammar-based questions of top exams such as CAT and XAT, present many challenges- long and complex sentences, multiple errors, subtle differences.
Thorough preparation is the key. Thanks to media, we’ve internalized a lot of nonstandard jargon, which we assume are appropriate even in the academic context. Much of those usages are incorrect in a test scenario. Hence you have to both learn and unlearn grammar.
How do you start
If you sit down to learn grammar, there is a mindboggling collection of grammar books on the shelves that examine every nuance from a linguistic point of view. You do not need all these. You just need an aptitude-focused course that exhaustively catalogues and illustrates those usage points that are relevant to graduate level entrance tests.
Stage 1: work with simple exercises in a workbook form covering all parts of speech. This helps to review sentence structures long forgotten.
Study illustrative sentences for those usages- nouns, pronouns, subject, verb, modifiers, conjunctions, prepositions… how they agree with other parts of the sentence.
Stage 2: now you must move on to syntax- various word arrangements in the sentence, the dos and don’ts of sentence construction, sentence variety, effectiveness expressions
Stage 3: work with test related concepts, the format of commonly asked questions, strategies for answering those question types and speed techniques.
Stage 4: Practice with good quality questions, take timed full verbal tests, review areas of weakness.