Sentence Combination
Some questions will ask you to combine two or, occasionally,
three sentences. For combining sentences questions, you need only
reread the sentences you’ve been asked to combine. Context does
not usually matter. Here are two typical sentence combination questions:
Which of the following is the best
way to combine and revise sentences 5 and 6?
How should the underlined portions of sentences 4 and
5, which are reprinted below, be revised so that the two sentences
combine into one? |
Frequently, you’ll combine the sentences by using a comma
and a conjunction (a conjunction is a word like and, but,
so, etc.). You can also combine sentences using semicolons
and colons. All of the different combination methods are discussed
below.
Some rare sentence combination questions will require
you to look at context:
| In order to vary the repetitive sentence
structure of the sentences in the first paragraph, how should sentences
8 and 9 be combined? |
On a question like this, you must look back at the relevant
paragraph so that you know what repetitive sentence structure the
question is asking you about.
Comma and Conjunction
Say the question asks you to combine these two sentences:
| She accidentally flushed her ring down
the toilet. The plumber got it back for her. |
One way of combining these two sentences is to use a comma
and a conjunction. In this case, using a comma and a conjunction
gives you a sentence like this:
| She accidentally flushed her ring down
the toilet, but the plumber got it back for her. |
Be sure the conjunction you choose makes sense. The revision
below is grammatically correct, but logically flawed:
| She accidentally flushed her ring down
the toilet, because the plumber got it back for her. |
The word because does not make sense,
since it suggests that the woman in question flushed her ring down
the toilet a second time as a result of the plumber initially retrieving it.
Semicolon
If two sentences are closely related, you can combine
them with a semicolon. Say you begin with these two sentences:
| Margaret recently met her future mother-in-law.
Problems ensued immediately. |
Using a semicolon, the combination is:
| Margaret recently met her future mother-in-law;
problems ensued immediately. |
Expressing a Logical Relationship
Some sentence combination questions will ask you to combine
two sentences in a way that makes their relationship more clear.
As always, it’s true that it’s a good idea to prepare your own answer.
It’s also true that on this specific type of question, the answer
choices can do a lot of the grunt work for you. They’ll make it
clear what kind of logical relationship the test writers see between
the two sentences, and you’ll simply have to pick the grammatically
and logically correct answer choice. Look at this example:
|
|
|
To
vary the pattern of sentences in the first paragraph, which of the
following is the best way to combine sentences 2 and 3 (reprinted
below)? |
|
My sister eats cottage cheese and grapes for
lunch. I eat tacos. |
| (A) |
While my sister eats cottage cheese and grapes for lunch,
tacos are what I’m eating. |
| (B) |
In contrast to my sister eating cottage cheese and grapes
for lunch, I will be eating tacos. |
| (C) |
My sister was eating cottage cheese and grapes for lunch,
I was eating tacos. |
| (D) |
My sister eats cottage cheese and grapes for lunch and
I am not the same because I eat tacos. |
| (E) |
Unlike my sister, who eats cottage cheese and grapes for
lunch, I eat tacos. |
|
The correct answer is (E). As you can see, all of the
answer choices express the basic logical relationship between the
two sentences: the speaker is drawing a contrast between her sister’s
eating habits and her own. Only answer choice (E), however, expresses
this contrast grammatically. (A) has a parallelism error; it begins
by saying my sister eats, so the second half of
the sentence should say I eat, so that both halves
of the sentence use present tense. However, the second half of the
sentence reads I’m eating. (B) has a tense problem;
the sister is eating in the present tense, but the speaker is eating
sometime in the future. This changes the original meaning of the
two sentences, in which both people are eating at the same time.
Answer choice (C) is a run-on sentence. Answer choice (D) is awkward
and wordy because of the phrase and I am not the same.
