English Language and Literature: Grammar Accuracy and Literary Recognition
Grammar essentials
Written-test English rewards precision. Revise tense and aspect, subject-verb agreement, articles, prepositions, conditional sentences, voice, narration, and modifiers. Learn the standard correction categories: dangling modifiers, faulty parallelism, pronoun-reference ambiguity, and misplaced comparisons. For vocabulary, study synonyms, antonyms, idioms, and one-word substitutions, plus spelling rules such as i-before-e and doubling of final consonants.
Composition skills
Practise error correction, sentence completion, cloze passages, and paragraph organisation. In a cloze passage, read the whole passage before choosing: the correct option must fit both grammar and meaning. For transformation questions, keep the original meaning intact while changing voice or narration.
Literature
Know the major periods and figures: Shakespeare (tragedy, comedy, sonnet), the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron), the Victorian novelists (Dickens, Hardy, Eliot), and modern writers. Be able to identify the author of a well-known line, the genre of a work, and basic literary terms - metaphor, simile, personification, irony, soliloquy, blank verse, and sonnet form. Do not guess an attribution; if unsure, eliminate by period and style.
Traps and a rule of thumb
Frequent traps: a subject separated from its verb by a long phrase; collective nouns treated as plural; 'fewer' versus 'less'; and distractors that are grammatically possible but semantically wrong. Rule of thumb for agreement: strip the sentence to its subject and verb before deciding. Worked example: 'The list of items on the desk (was/were) long.' Remove the prepositional phrase 'of items on the desk'; the subject is 'list', singular, so the answer is 'was'.