Revision Skills, Including Sentence-Level Skills
Revise for economy, then for logic
Revision questions give you a sentence or short passage plus four versions. Two are usually ungrammatical, one is grammatical but wordy or illogical, and one is best. Work in that order: eliminate grammar errors, then redundancy, then meaning changes.
What to look for: redundancy ('each and every', 'in my personal opinion', 'return back'); expletives and nominalizations ('There is a need for' becomes 'we need'); strings of 'which is' or 'that was' that should collapse into a single clause; coordination versus subordination - use a subordinate clause to show which idea is background ('Because the storm hit, the power failed', not 'The storm hit, and the power failed'); transitions that must match the logical relation (cause, contrast, example, concession); placement of a sentence within a paragraph, usually after the idea it illustrates or before the point it supports; and tone consistency, since a chatty phrase inside a formal report is a flaw.
Traps: the shortest option is sometimes ungrammatical or drops necessary information; 'correcting' a sentence that was already fine; a pronoun ('this', 'it') with no clear referent; and options that quietly shift the claim (all to many, will to may). Meaning is the tiebreaker.
Rule of thumb: delete every word whose removal leaves the meaning unchanged, then confirm the logical connector still points the right way.
Worked example: 'The storm hit. The power failed immediately.' becomes 'When the storm hit, the power failed immediately' - one sentence, and the temporal relation is explicit.