Of all the topics you must study to prepare for the GMAT, there are
two in particular that will have the greatest benefit after test day:
the AWA Essay section and Sentence Correction
section. Effective writing is a vital part of business communication.
The skills you learn here in preparation for these sections will carry
far beyond test day. So while it is unlikely the Pythagorean theorem
or quadratic equations will come in handy after test day, knowing
a misplaced modifier when you see one is a skill you never want to
forget.
About 14 of the 41 Verbal section questions – or 35
percent of them - are Sentence Correction.
The directions for these questions
look like this:
Directions:
The following questions consist of sentences that are either partly
or entirely underlined. Below each sentence are five versions of
the underlined portion of the sentence. Choice (A) is a copy of
the original version. The four other answer choices change the underlined
portion of the sentence. Read the sentence and the five choices
carefully and select the best version.
These questions test your knowledge of correct
grammatical usage and your sense of clear and economical writing.
Choose answers according to the norms of standard written
English for grammar, word choice, and sentence construction.
Your selected answer should express the intended meaning of the original
sentence as clearly and precisely as possible, while
avoiding ambiguous, awkward, or unnecessarily wordy constructions.
There are two phrases you should pay
particular attention to in these directions:
- "Standard
Written English" Standard Written English is
not what we use for casual communication, and it is not as formal
as the English used in scholarly writing.
- "Clearly and precisely"
Knowledge of "correct grammatical usage," by itself, isn't
sufficient to find the right answer: you also need to look for answers
that are concise and not redundant.
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