GMAT Sentence Correction: Focus Question 1
August 23, 2006I sat down today to write the first of what I imagined to be a series of grammar tutorials, but I to think better of it. I don’t teach grammar (at least not in the old-fashioned, sentence-diagramming-at-the-chalkboard way) to my students in person, so why would I think that’s best for you?
Instead, I’m going to start a different kind of GMAT Sentence Correction series. Each installment will focus on one question from The Official Guide for GMAT Review or The Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review. As I do when working with students one-on-one, I’ll use these focus questions as a doorway into more broadly useful definitions.
Focus Question #1
Today I’ll focus on a question from the Verbal Review book: #7, which you can find on page 235.
Delighted by the reported earnings for the first quarter of the fiscal year, it was decided by the company manager to give her staff a raise.
This isn’t a particularly difficult SC question, nor does it contain any nasty traps. However, it illustrates two of the most common types of grammar and usage mistakes you’ll see in incorrect SC questions. Let’s start with the underlined portion:
it was decided by the company manager to give her staff a raise.
When “it” refers to something other than a thing being described (a dog, a desk, a country), “it” as the subject is almost never correct. Because the sentence is about a decision made by the company manager, the company manager herself should be the subject.
Passive Voice
In more general terms, the sentence as written uses passive voice. While, very occasionally, a GMAT SC correct answer will use passive voice, passive constructions are always wrong when an active construction is available. Passive voice is characterized by a misplacement of the subject, like putting the company manager where she is in this sentence. Often, passive constructions use the verb “was,” as is the case here.
In short, if somebody or something did something, the actor should come first. “I did it” is much better than “it was done by me.”
Another variation on passive voice is given by choice (D):
the staff was given a raise by the company manager
That’s a tiny bit better than the original sentence, but since the company manager is the one who did something, she needs to appear in the sentence first. Clearly, we’re looking for something like choice (C):
the company manager decided to give her staff a raise
As you probably have noticed, we figured all of that out without looking at the rest of the sentence. That’s not good GMAT SC strategy, but on some simpler questions, the non-underlined portion of the sentence just isn’t important. While that turned out to be the case here, there’s something to be learned from the introductory clause, as well.
Introductory Clauses
“Delighted by the reported earnings for the first quarter of the fiscal year” is what grammarians call an “introductory adverbial clause.” That’s a fancy (and efficient) way of saying “a description, found at the beginning of a sentence, that described the subject of that sentence.”
However you describe it, there’s one fundamental rule with clauses such as these: the first word to follow the comma must be the thing that the clause is describing. In this case, the word following the comma should describe whoever it was who was “delighted….” Since it is the company manager who was delighted and decided to give her staff a raise, “the company manager” needs to appear right after the comma.
Choice (C) is the only answer that puts it there. As it turns out, recognizing either of the errors—the passive construction and the incorrect word following the opening clause—would have been enough to answer the question correctly. Of course, that isn’t always the case: to get every Sentence Correction question right, you’ll need a vast toolbox of grammar rules, idioms, and usage guidelines.
I’ll write about some of those in the coming weeks.
Jeff Sackmann is a GMAT tutor based in New York City. He has created many resources for GMAT preparation, including the popular GMAT Math Bible and GMAT Verbal Bible, as well as 1,800 practice GMAT math questions.
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