<p>On my last practice test I got all of the improving essay questions right, all but one of the improving sentence questions right, but got about half of the identifying sentence error questions wrong. How can I significantly improve the amount of identifying error questions I get right? Are there any books/guides I can use?</p>
<p>Most definitely! If you’re missing so many, start with the basics. More than half of he Error ID questions are either:</p>
<p>1) Verb (subject-verb agreement or verb tense consistency)
2) Pronoun (pronoun-antecedent agreement or pronoun case)
3) Parallelism (lists, comparisons, etc)</p>
<p>So I advocate a formula. Go through the questions mechanically, stopping every time you see an underlined verb to confirm that it agrees with its subject (IE the cat jumps, not the cats jumps), and that its tense makes sense given the tenses of other verbs in the sentence.</p>
<p>Once you’ve finished the verbs, do a similar check for underlined pronouns; make sure they all agree with the words they’re supposed to replace (you’re looking for singular/plural relationships here, paying special attention to the word “they,” which can NEVER be used to replace something singular, even if it’s replacing a person whose sex you don’t know). </p>
<p>If both of those are good, look for list and comparison parallelism errors. Examples:</p>
<p>BAD list: I enjoy skiing, mountain biking, and to go fishing.
GOOD list: I like to go skiing, mountain biking, and fishing.</p>
<p>BAD comparison: Bob’s cooking is better tasting than Dave.
GOOD comparison: Bob’s cooking is better tasting that Dave’s.</p>
<p>Note that in comparisons, the grammar technically COULD be right in the example, if you had cannibalistic proclivities. I’m assuming you don’t.</p>
<p>There are other, less common errors that exist as well, and a search of these forums or the larger internet will certainly yield a wealth of grammar knowledge, but these are the most common, and the ones you should work on mastering first, before you begin to worry about memorizing every known idiom, etc.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Nice list …</p>