Sentence Correction for CAT

Sentence Correction in CAT is not a very highlighted but important topic in grammar topic of Verbal section.The questions generally asked in this category are in the form of multiple choice where four sentences are given and you have to select on which is correct. The choices given are very close so it is necessary to understand the basic difference between the given options. Mostly these sentences tend to create a confusion in usage of verbs in sentences. Let us begin with an example first, The boy, running down the street so that he could meet his mother in time for dinner. The boy ran down the street so that he could meet his mother in time for dinner. You probably knew the first sentence was incorrect immediately, but the CAT actually has that same terrible non-sentence as wrong answer choices all the time; they just hide it better. It’s called a ‘sentence fragment,’ precisely because it is not a sentence. It lacks an actual verb. The ‘—ing’ structure (the ‘present participle’) is actually a form of a modifier, a word or phrase that describes something else in the sentence. CAT Sentence Correction makes its sentence fragments harder to spot, adding all kinds of other modifying phrases so that you lose track of the fact that, hey, there’s a not a single verb here. Whenever you see verbs and modifiers-that-look-like-verbs switching places in the answer choices, you should check for Big Structure Issues in your splits. Make sure you don’t have sentence fragments (no sentence), run-on sentences (two full sentences not joined together correctly), or other bad structures at the core of your sentence. Note that while ‘—ing’ modifiers are easier to spot, other modifiers really look like verbs. ‘Kicked,’ for example, could be the past tense or the past participle of ‘to kick.’ “The soccer player fell to the ground, kicked in the face by his opponent.”Here, ‘kicked’ is a modifier. “His opponent accidentally kicked him in the face, and he fell to the ground.”Here, ‘kicked’ is a verb. Point being, look carefully to see how a word is used in a sentence. The sentence will need different structures, depending on whether a word is verb or a modifier.But what we need to discuss here is a more difficult and subtle way that CAT Sentence Correction requires you to understand the difference between verbs and modifiers. To introduce the concept, here are two sentences: 1) He carries the trunk up the stairs, sweating the whole way up. 2) He carries the trunk up the stairs and sweats the whole way up. Believe it or not, the CAT prefers one of these sentences over the other. There’s no grammatical issue here—both of these sentences are 100% correct when it comes to grammar and structure. The issue here is an issue with meaning. One thing to note about ‘—ing’ modifiers: when they come after a comma, they modify an entire subject/verb clause. So in sentence 1, ‘sweating the whole way up,’ modifies the subject-verb clause, ‘He carries the trunk.’ This is nice, actually—it inherently links the sweating to the carrying. Sentence 2, on the other hand, isn’t quite so nice. We’re told he carries and sweats, but we lose the explicit connection between the two. Why does he sweat? Is it because he is carrying the trunk? Or is it hot? Or is he just a guy who sweats a lot? I mean, sure, we know why, but the CAT prefers that the grammar also knows why. So it would choose sentence 1 here.