At Magoosh, we are constantly looking for ways to make our product better. Recently, we have been making changes in the Sentence Correction portion of our product. Our SC lesson videos had been organized primarily by areas of grammar, but of course, the GMAT Sentence Correction questions are about much more than grammar. We recently decided to use the OG’s own Sentence Correction categories as our SC organizing principle.
The eight categories
In the OG13, at the very beginning of the Sentence Correction section, the OG has a short section in which it lists the eight concept areas that the Sentence Correction questions test. Here are the eight concept areas, from pp. 665-669 of the OG13:
1) Verb Form (tenses, mood, voice, participles, gerunds, infinitives)
2) Agreement (noun-verb, antecedent-pronoun)
3) Grammatical Construction (ways in which long sentences can be organized)
4) Parallelism (one of the GMAT’s favorites!)
5) Logical Predication (misplaced modifiers, faulty comparisons, etc.; does the sentence actually say what the author is obviously trying to say?)
6) Diction (individual word use, e.g. less vs. fewer, because vs. due to, etc.)
7) Idioms (combinations of words, for example unique [verb]+[preposition] combinations)
8) Rhetorical Construction (does the sentence convey its message in the most effective way? concise, clear, direct, powerful, no ambiguity, no redundancy, etc.)
Here’s a look at some of our lessons and how they’re now organized. Within this new layout, we plan on making continued updates and improvements as needed. So be sure to check out the Magoosh GMAT Lessons page for the full, most current list.
Click here if you want to watch some of the sample videos yourself!
Our order, different from the OG’s order, reflect our views on the proper pedagogical treatment of the topics.
We made this change because our previous focus on grammar points did not properly capture the questions we have that, like questions in the OG, focus on issue of logic, diction, idiom, or rhetoric. In many ways, if you had to sum up what the GMAT Sentence Correction is about, the term “logical organization” would in many ways be more apt than the word “grammar.” Our new categories reflect this. These categories are now the “subject categories” for our Sentence Correction, which means Magoosh users can choose to practice question from any of these eight categories.
Viewing our product through this lens, we also have re-classified & re-organized our existing 39 Sentence Correction video lessons, and we have started adding more. Over the next few months, we will more than double our number of Sentence Correction video lessons, covering all the details of each of these eight conceptual regions.
Let us know what you think, or if you have any suggestions. Happy studying! 🙂
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