English Language, Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling
What the exam tests
This domain asks you to apply standard written English under the pressure of verbatim transcription. A candidate must command agreement (subject-verb, pronoun-antecedent), the full inventory of verb forms (tense, aspect, mood, voice), the nominative/objective/possessive pronoun cases, and the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. Punctuation is tested in context, not in isolation: commas with introductory elements and appositives, semicolons joining independent clauses, colons before lists or explanations, apostrophes for possession versus plural, and quotation punctuation around reported speech. Spelling questions favor homophones (council/counsel, principal/principle, liable/libel), doubled consonants, and words whose misspellings survive spellcheck.
Traps to expect
- Dangling and misplaced modifiers, especially introductory participles: "Having sworn the witness, the clerk..." presupposes the clerk swore someone.
- Faulty parallelism in lists and correlative pairs ("neither... nor" must join like structures).
- Comma splices and run-ons passed off as correct because they sound natural.
- Pronoun ambiguity where "it" or "they" could refer to two antecedents.
- Possessive traps: "the witness's statement," "the Joneses' home," "its" versus "it's."
- Spelling near-misses that look right at a glance.
Rule of thumb
Read a sentence aloud and ask: who is doing what to whom? If the answer is unclear, the grammar is probably wrong. For punctuation, remember that a semicolon needs an independent clause on both sides; a colon needs one only on the left.
Worked example
"The attorney objected, the judge sustained the objection." Two independent clauses joined by a comma form a splice. Fix with a semicolon, a period, or a coordinating conjunction: "The attorney objected, and the judge sustained the objection."