davetzulin Wrote:OK, so now, after looking at it for some time i agree there is no fundamental difference, but how can you quickly determine that?
well, see, there's the issue here: the way that you think about these things -- at least when you label them as "academic" -- isn't like the way most people think.
i mean is this: if generalized, your question corresponds to a mental state that is something like, "my default state is to notice minute differences in meaning
first, before noticing similarities".
that's a rather unusual way of thinking, largely restricted to people who do lots of stuff involving formal logic/reasoning (programming, mathematics, certain types of philosophical argument, etc.)
the default state of most of humanity, on the other hand, is to find
similarities, not differences, by default. (this is the reason why so much poetry involves abstract comparisons -- "shall i compare thee to a summer's day", and all that -- and hardly any poetry focuses on the minute differences between otherwise similar things.)
this is the whole idea behind the "splits" method of approaching sentence correction problems -- the idea that
most people aren't going to notice differences unless those differences specifically occur as "splits" in the answer options.
if your default assumption is to see minute differences, then, ironically, you should probably dispense with the splits method altogether, because you'll
already be noticing those differences without having to make the effort.
And say you were taking the test and were stumped on that modifier moving around would you give up and look for something else?
QUESTION:
And say you were taking the test and were stumped on _________, would you give up and look for something else?
ANSWER:
yes.
That is pretty much my biggest problem, getting stuck on a particular aspect of an answer choice and really not getting anywhere with it.
well, dave, unfortunately, you are currently up against a test whose entire purpose is to favor people who "hit it or quit it", that is, who
make decisions without too much deliberation. (this is why there are so many problems and so little time to solve them.)
notably, that includes making the decision to quit -- FAST -- if you are stuck. on anything.
i kno i can't learn every rule, nevermind MASTERING every rule , so I think my best approach now is to try and do the same things the experts do when they approach the problem.
yes and no. this is going to depend on which expert, and on how much your background has in common with his or hers.
i, for instance, am (among other things) a professional writer and editor with many years of experience. i don't consciously know
any "rules" of the english language, save for the most basic ones (like singular subject/singular verb and so forth); i solve 100% of sentence correction problems by simply looking at the choices and intuitively knowing which are right and which are wrong.
... in precisely the same way you would watch an injured person's gait and, without knowing any "rules" about how people are supposed to walk, immediately and intuitively
know that you were looking at an injured person.
(by the way, this is also why i always supply so many examples when i explain things -- i don't actually know any of the objective principles consciously. i have to think about tons and tons of relevant examples that are correct and incorrect, and
derive whatever "rule" or principle from those examples.)
where i'm going with this is that "try[ing] to do the same things the experts do" is not a good idea if, say, a particular expert at hand is a native-english-speaking professional writer and the student is a non-writer for whom english is a second (or third or fourth) language.
on the other hand, if you find an expert who has lots of background in common with you -- like, if you are a second-language speaker of english and you find an expert who is also a second-language speaker of english -- then you've got something there.
