How to Approach Identifying Sentence
Errors Questions
1. Read the sentence and try to hear the mistake.
Sometimes all you have to do is read the sentence, and
immediately you’ll hear the problem. If that happens, great.
2. If you don’t hear the mistake, eliminate underlined
parts that are correct.
Sometimes, though, you’ll read the sentence without hearing
a mistake. If your initial reading of the sentence doesn’t result
in finding the answer, go through the underlined parts and eliminate
those that are correct. Take a look at the example a few lines back.
Say you read that sentence once and didn’t hear a problem. You would
then go through the sentence again, crossing off underlined parts
that are correct. Which—that might be wrong. You’re
not sure, so keep the answer choice for now. Were—also
could be wrong. There might be a subject-verb agreement problem.
Keep it. Rowdy for—you feel sure there’s nothing
wrong with that. Eliminate answer choice (C) by crossing it out
in your test booklet. Audience—nothing wrong with
that, either. A Broadway audience is a grammatically impeccable
phrase. Cross out (D) in your test booklet. Now you’re down to (A)
and (B), and it’s time to move to step 3. For the moment, since
you’re not sure if an error exists, do not eliminate choice (E).
3. Check for errors in the remaining underlined
parts.
|
|
|
| The crowd, | which | clamored for the play to begin, | were | surprisingly |
| | A | | B | |
| rowdy for | a Broadway | audience | . | No error |
| | C | | D | | E |
|
|
Look at your two remaining choices, (A) and (B). Answer
choice (A) is which. Sometimes which is
mistakenly used instead of that, but here, which is
the correct choice. (Quick rule: when there’s a comma, choose which;
when there’s no comma, choose that.) You can eliminate
(A). What about (B), were? Were is
a verb. Subject-verb agreement problems are commonly tested on this
section of the test. What is the subject of were? The
crowd. Standing between the subject and the verb is an
adjectival clause, which clamored for the play to begin.
Get rid of the adjectival clause for the moment, so you can more
easily see whether the subject matches up with the verb. When you
eliminate the clause, you get the crowd were. That
doesn’t match. The crowd is a singular subject,
and were is a plural verb. (B) is the correct answer.
4. Trust yourself. If you can’t hear an error, and
you can’t find an error, it’s probably an error-free sentence.
Remember, about 1/
5 of the time the answer will
be (E), no error. Sometimes you’ll read the sentence, eliminate
the error-free underlined parts, and find that you’ve crossed out
every single underlined part. If this happens, don’t second-guess
yourself. Don’t force yourself to find an error where none exists.
