LET’S PUT THIS ALL TOGETHER AND
PRACTICE!
Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: It’s time to put everything you’ve
learned to the test with a sample passage. But first, a suggestion about the
procedure you should follow when doing Writing and Language sentence
correction questions (which make up most of the test):
- Read the whole sentence, not just the underlined part. Often the underlined
part is grammatically correct by itself but is wrong in the context of the
whole sentence. - Even if you think that the original sentence is correct, plug in each
fragment and read out each version of the sentence in your head to make
sure there isn’t a better option. - If you still think that the original sentence is correct, then pick NO
CHANGE. - If you decide that the sentence is wrong, look for the choice that will make
it right. If you run through the different options per step 2, you should find
one that just sounds right. - If you are completely stumped and can’t figure out the answer, choose the
shortest one. English is a relatively efficient language. Good writing often
involves short, to-the-point sentences that don’t go on for ever and ever
talking about all sorts of things, and getting redundant, and being just
generally too long, when they could be short but aren’t because they’re
long, in fact much longer than they have to be (like this sentence). So