Sentence Correction questions can include up to 54 words, making for incredibly long sentences and time consuming reading. But similar to GMAT SC - Spot Decision Points, knowing what is likely to be a testable section of a sentence and what is not, you can break apart the sentence into the parts that matter to you as a test-taker. Proper nouns, correctly-applied modifiers, adjectives and adverbs can all be streamlined to make for shorter sentences.
For example, in the sentence:
Originally called BackRub, Google was founded by two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page, whose father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a computer science professor at Michigan State University, and Sergey Brin.
The proper nouns and excessive adjectives can be eliminated or condensed, bringing you down to:
Originally called BackRub, Google was founded by two students, Larry, whose father, Carl, was a professor, and Sergey.
Now it is easier to check the modifiers to make sure they’re aptly describing each portion of the sentence. “Originally called BackRub” can logically modify Google, so we can break off that part of the sentence… There’s nothing else that can be wrong with that option.
Google was founded by two students, Larry, whose father, Carl, was a professor, and Sergey.
“whose father” logically modifies “Larry;” “Carl” logically modifies “father,” and “Larry and Sergey” logically modifies “students,” so we can confirm that this sentence is correct. More importantly, as there are four other answer choices that are similarly structured, we can more quickly ascertain the decision points by looking at a shorter sentence, making our work significantly easier and quicker. Again, this relates to a business skill – if you can identify which items are superfluous and which are the most important opportunities to add value, you can be a much more efficient manager and a more valuable asset.