GMAT Grammar

Deepen your comprehension of these complex grammatical forms so you use them effectively on GMAT Sentence Correction What is an adjectival phrase?  What is an adjectival clause?  What’s the difference between them? Points of Grammar: An adjective is a word that modifies a noun.  They are the colorful emotional words that spice up the language.  […]

Understand these complex grammatical forms so you can master them on GMAT Sentence Correction What is an adverbial phrase?  What is an adverbial clause?  What’s the difference between them?  Do they have to contain adverbs?   Points of Grammar: An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.  We can […]

Would that you understood this complex form, lest you be confused on GMAT Sentence Correction! Some of the more difficult GMAT Sentence Correction questions will involve the subjunctive.  What is the subjunctive? Verb Moods In addition to tenses (past, present, future) and number (singular vs. plural), verbs also have “moods”.  English has three verb moods: […]

Friends, Romans, countrymen: It is time to learn about appositive phrases!  But first, a practice sentence: 1. Being America’s national bird, the Bald Eagle has little natural predators like the Great Horned Owl, and their population dwindling to almost nothing up to the point of DDT being banned. (A) Being America’s national bird, the Bald […]

On the GMAT Sentence Correction, the “-ing” form of a verb will sometimes act as part of the main verb: in this case, it is part of one of the Progressive Tenses of a verb.  Sometimes the “-ing” form of a verb will modify a noun: in this case, it is a participle.  Sometimes, though, […]

The word “however” is a tricky word with an interesting history. First, a couple practice questions in which this word appears.

After answering a question on GMAT Club, I realized that one type of error is not on every student’s radar. Many students are attuned to parallelism and are vigilant about eradicating modification errors. Same goes for the more typical grammar errors—students know about subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement. But double negatives have floated below the […]

This is a funny grammar topic.  It’s so basic, that it would not be tested directly on a GMAT Sentence Correction question, and yet getting clear on these issues can clear up some confusion about grammar questions.   Direct Object The direct object is the noun that receives the action of the verb.  The subject […]

Prepositions in English display a powerful diversity of uses.  In the previous preposition article, we talked about the proposition “to”.  Here, we will look, at the preposition “with.”   The preposition “with” The word “with” is a preposition.  This means, it must be followed by a noun — or by something playing the role of […]

Introduction: parallelism Parallelism is one of the GMAT’s favorite grammatical structures.  Probably almost half of all SC questions involve parallelism of some kind.  Of course, one can put nouns or adjectives into parallel, but what’s the fun of that?  Parallelism only gets interesting when you put entire verbs or verb phrases (e.g. infinitive phrases, participial […]

This post is about a patently obvious rule of grammar.  Sometimes the most obvious rules are not so obvious in the midst of complexity.  First, try this practice question about the famous 16th century Japanese military leader Oda Nobunaga.   Practice Question In the 1560 Battle of Okehazama, in which the warlord Imagawa Yoshimoto was […]

We use verb tense to indicate the time of the action of the verb.  Of course, the basic meat-and-potato tenses are past, present, and future.  GMAT grammar would be very easier if these were the only tenses you had to know.  But life is complicated, and therefore so is grammar.  This article examines a variation […]

Infinitives The infinitive is the most basic default form of a verb.  Verbs are listed in the dictionary by their infinitive forms.  To make an infinitive, we add the preposition “to” in front of the verb: to walk, to run, to love, to buy, to sell, to be or not to be.  Even though it […]

Below are two excerpts from popular news sources. Accompanying each excerpt is a slightly modified version of the sentence that contains one or more grammatical flaws. See if you know which excerpt is from an actual news source, and which one is the result of my assiduous fudging!   New Yorker For our first specimen, […]

Don’t reproduce spoken-English mistakes in GMAT Sentence Correction! It’s logical, but … Consider the following sentences. 1) Unlike the full gram of potassium found in a baked potato, a banana has only about 600 milligrams. 2) So upset with the low wages set in the new contract, management had to hear a long litany of […]

Learn about the importance of this elite category of modifiers. Not all modifiers are created equal! All noun modifiers, by definition, give additional information about the noun they modify.  BUT, the importance of that additional information can vary significantly. Consider the following two sentences, both with modifiers underlined.   1) Last year, I visited the […]

Overcoming some of the most common grammar mistakes In the business world, there are plenty of numbers, and those numbers are always in flux, going up or down.  Not surprisingly, many of the sentences you will correct on the GMAT have topics that discuss quantities of various things and how those quantities change.  Much of […]