People are talking about the new GMAT, and the way that Sentence Correction will test your comprehension of the sentence’s meaning as well as its grammar, style, and concision, by giving you more answer choices that are grammatically correct (but still wrong). In this series of articles, I want to explore the ways this can happen, with some example questions for you as well. First, let’s talk about punctuation.
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Punctuation
Sentence A: Let’s eat, Grandma!
Sentence B: Let’s eat Grandma!
Sentence C: Every dog knows its master.
Sentence D: Every dog knows it’s master.
The ancient Romans wrote with little or no punctuation, and usually without even putting any spaces between the words. It is hard to imagine the confusion that could arise from that, when in English a simple mark (such as a comma or an apostrophe) can make such difference in the sense of the sentence. In the first pair, Sentence A conveys familial devotion, while B implies cannibalism; in the second pair, Sentence C features man’s best friend looking up to humans, while in Sentence D, the dog looks down on humans.
Of course, the GMAT is unlikely to feature something so simple (or potentially comical), but punctuation is often needed to reduce ambiguity or to change the meaning of a phrase or clause. Relative clauses – clauses starting with a relative pronoun like which, who, or that – are prime candidates for a change in meaning, especially ones starting with which or that. Semicolons and commas, because they separate clauses, can also change the meaning of a sentence by changing the point where one clause begins and another ends.
