The GMAT Sentence Correction section falls under the verbal section of the GMAT exam. The questions in this section contribute to over 40% of the total questions of the verbal section. It is therefore recommended that you are well prepared for this section to be able to score well and boost your overall GMAT score. So, how can you get a good score? Well, you can follow some GMAT sentence correction rules to answer these questions correctly and score well. Therefore, in this article, let us look at some of these rules. 

GMAT Sentence Correction

The Sentence corrections questions will basically expect you to look for errors in the given sentence and proceed to choose the correct answer. The main objective of this section is to check your English language proficiency. These questions also evaluate your ability to utilise appropriate expressions in the right places. 

It is essential that you are familiar with the GMAT Sentence correction rules to do well in this section. Below, we have listed a few of the important rules to help you identify the common errors you are likely to come across with these types of questions.

• Check if the order of the words are correct. Evaluate the sentence to check if the intended meaning is correct, or if the structure of the sentence is clear.
• Familiarise yourself with common GMAT idioms generally used. The sentence must appear idiomatically correct in addition to sounding grammatically correct.
• Look out for any parallelism errors. The sentence should follow the same pattern of consistent verb tense and nouns throughout.
• GMAT often tests you on modifiers – they are usually clauses, phrases or words which help to describe different parts of a sentence. Dangling modifiers are the most common types of errors which you will find in these types of questions. To identify such modifiers you must look out for introductory phrases which are followed by a comma. The phrase will have to modify a noun which is logical in the context of the sentence.
• Another common type of error which you will encounter in this section is verb tense. These questions may use incorrect forms of past, present or future tense. The verb tense is usually expected to stay consistent throughout the sentence.
• Illogical comparisons is yet another error which you will need to look out for in the sentence correction questions. An example for this is – Amy loves sleeping more than her daughter. The sentence must actually read – Amy loves to sleep more than her daughter does. You must make sure that the things which are being compared make sense in terms of context. Some words which you can watch out for with illogical comparisons are – “more/less than” , “unlike/like”, “ as” etc.
• The sentence correction questions also test your understanding of the countable versus uncountable objects. You must verify if the uncountable objects are accompanied by singular nouns. 
• Subject pronoun usage error is also tested periodically in the sentence correction questions. A correct pronoun must match the respective singular/plural antecedent or verb to go with the subject.

Now that you are aware of the errors which you would generally come across in this section. The next important step is to learn tips on how to solve these questions. 

Tips to Solve GMAT Sentence Correction Questions 

• Eliminate incorrect answer choices that you feel are inappropriate in context to the sentence given. You should be on the lookout for passive voice options since this is generally not tested on the GMAT.
• Ensure that you are patient and read through the entire question instead of hurriedly reading through the sentences. This could help you identify the error right away or else you could end up missing important and crucial information.
• Pay attention to each detail of the sentence, even the slightest of errors like a missing comma or an extra ‘s’ could make a lot of difference.
• Another thing to remember is to comprehend what the author is trying to convey. You must first gain more clarity on the content, this will enable you to understand where the errors occur in the sentence.
• Finally, do consider the probability that the sentence could be correct as it is given and need not always have an error in it.

It is important to remember the GMAT Sentence Correction rules that we have listed in this article to help you to do well in this section. So practice keeping all these rules in mind and you will score well. Good Luck!