How to go about the Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction Guide

[ritika_karki]

I recently started studying the Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction Guide . There are a number of concepts and rules which have been listed topic-wise . Is it sufficient if I go through the book once or do I need to memorize the rules as well ? Thanks . :)

[jlucero]

[Editor's note- in the future, please post these types of topics in "General Verbal" forum]

It's probably different for every person, but I don't think memorizing nor simply reading the book alone is sufficient for significantly helping your SC ability. What you need to be able to do is notice the topics that are being test on real GMAT questions. Think of the SC book as a workbook to help you to more easily identify GMAT errors and learn how to choose which options are incorrect.

One thing that the SC book mentions and will help to more easily identify many of the topics in the SC book is to be able to find the core of a sentence- often times the main subject and verb and some necessary additional parts. If you can eliminate most of the modifiers in the sentence, you will be able to more easily spot issues of S-V agreement and parallelism. Then you can look at the modifiers that you've eliminated and see if they are in the correct place.

Ultimately, the SC book helps for you to be aware of some of the topics that the GMAT commonly tests, but until you can spot these topics and learn to correct them on real GMAT questions, your studying will only be helpful for nit-picking your friends and coworkers on their improper grammar :)