English: Sentence Control and Rhetorical Choices
Sentence boundaries and agreement first
The English section asks you to revise passages, so every question has a context: a sentence, a paragraph, or the whole essay. Your job is to choose the version that is clearest, most grammatical, and most consistent with the passage's purpose and tone. The highest-yield concepts are sentence boundaries, subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement and clarity, punctuation (commas, semicolons, colons, apostrophes), modifier placement, parallelism, verb tense consistency, transitions, and concision.
Traps cluster around a few familiar errors. A comma splice joins two complete sentences with only a comma; a semicolon needs a complete sentence on each side. A subject followed by a prepositional phrase often hides its true number: 'The box of tools is,' not 'are.' Possessive apostrophes are tested against simple plurals. Dangling modifiers occur when the opening phrase does not describe the subject that follows. Redundancy questions reward the shortest version that keeps the meaning, but not if it drops a needed qualifier.
Worked example: 'The team of researchers were excited, they had finished the study.' Two problems appear. The true subject is 'team' (singular), so 'were' should be 'was.' The comma cannot join two independent clauses. A correct revision is 'The team of researchers was excited because it had finished the study.' Rule of thumb: remove prepositional phrases to find the subject, then test each clause boundary by asking whether both sides could stand alone.