Erika here with PrepScholar GMAT most sentence correction questions contain a
variety of errors however some errors are more critical than others in fact
some things we think of as errors often aren't errors at all today we'll apply
the math concept of order of operations to grammar so you can correctly
prioritize sentence correction rules as always if you like this video please
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more great GMAT content links are in the description so we can prioritize
sentence correction rules by breaking them down into three categories meaning
hard grammar and rhetoric of these meaning is the most important followed
by hard grammar and then finally rhetoric let's break down what these
categories mean and which rules fall under each our most important category
meaning is pretty straightforward it encapsulates any changes to the
intended meaning of the sentence one such way we can impact the meaning of
the sentence is through errors in logic if the meaning of the original sentence
is logical we can eliminate wrong answers that change this logic even if
they are grammatically correct on the other hand if the original sentence has
a meaning that is illogical we must choose an answer choice that corrects
the meaning of the sentence another way meaning is affected is through modifier
errors an incorrectly placed modifier can mean that half of your sentence is
describing the wrong word that's a pretty significant shift in meaning hard
grammar the next most important category involves the straight ahead hard and
fast right or wrong grammar rules for example agreement if you have a singular
noun and a plural verb it's wrong no two ways about it other rules in this group
include sentence structure so no fragments parallelism and tense again
pretty simple if it's right it's right if it's wrong it's wrong now before we
move on to our final and least important category rhetoric there's a middle
ground between hard grammar and rhetoric that's important to address and that's
idiom and diction now we just did a PrepScholar video on
idioms why am I putting it so far down the list here's why there are a ton of
idiom and diction rules now some we can trust as readily as we do our hard
grammar rules and that includes the ones in our recent idioms video however other
rules are used less consistently on the GMAT or have multiple acceptable
variations what you may have learned was a rule in a test prep book may not
always be true on the GMAT what may have been preferable on one problem may not
be on another so while some idiom and diction rules can be incredibly useful
on test day others are not and that leads us to our final category rhetoric
rhetoric is defined as the art of speaking or writing effectively it
encompasses the rules that are nice to follow but not necessarily deal-breakers
one classic example is concision it's nice to have the shortest possible
sentence but we'd rather have a long grammatically correct sentence than a
short grammatically incorrect sentence a couple others I see a lot of students
using to eliminate answer choices way too early are ambiguous pronouns and
passive voice ambiguous pronouns aren't great but there are real GMAT problems
in which the correct answers feature ambiguous pronouns the monkfish problem
we featured in our 700 plus sentence correction webinar is a really great
example of this similarly passive voice is much maligned it usually
isn't the fastest way to say something but it is 100% grammatically correct
finally awkwardness is something that gets thrown around a lot on forums
eliminating something because it sounds wrong should be your absolute last
resort our ears often betray us and GMAT test writers intentionally write complex
correct answers for this reason take another look at that monkfish problem if
you want an example of this don't trust your ear unless there's absolutely
nothing left to do okay so how do we apply this hierarchy to sentence
correction problems we can think of it as an order of operations for
elimination so when solving a long math equation we
start with parentheses then exponents followed by multiplication and division
and finally addition and subtraction similarly
when evaluating the grammar of a sentence we should prioritize
eliminating answers by focusing on issues of meaning first then moving on
to grammatical errors and only then finally addressing rhetorical concerns
so if for example you see right away that answer choice E is less concise
hold off on eliminating it if answer choices A through D have more important
problems E will be the correct answer despite its length however if there is
another answer choice that doesn't have meaning or grammar issues you may be
able to use the rhetorical issues in E to eliminate if you have any questions
what we talked about today or suggestions for future videos
please leave a comment below thanks for watching and happy GMAT studies