Universal approach to attack any SC question

[abhishekharitwal]

Dear Instructors,

Thank you for running such an educative forum.
Although I am very new to GMAT preparation, I am able to learn a lot from the forum discussions rather than any text book.

As a starter, I am having a difficulty in identifying the exact way to attack a SC problem.

For ex. If I have a sentence like:

Two months, nine days, and eight hours after their ordeal began, the last of 33 miners trapped in a hole a half mile under Chile was delivered to the earth’s surface.

Should I first check for:
1. S-V agreement
2. Parallelism
3. Eliminate the modifiers, and make it simple
4. Use of correct idioms
5. Shortlist the most appropriate answers
or something else.

In other words, what is the first question that i should ask myself as soon as I see a sentence question.

Sorry, if this has been captured in an earlier thread. I will be obliged if you can send me a link.

Thanks.

[RonPurewal]

there's definitely no such thing as a universal protocol -- you won't have time for that. there are way too many different kinds of errors, and way too little time, for a one-size-fits-all approach to be reasonable.

the key here is recognizing when you should look for certain types of errors.
for each type of error, you should be able to build a stimulus-response pair, like this:
"IF I SEE __________ (stimulus), THEN I SHOULD LOOK FOR ______ (error type)."

for instance:
"IF I SEE a split between singular and plural verbs, THEN I SHOULD look for the subject of those verbs and check for subject-verb agreement."

this is going to be especially important in the case of less frequent errors, such as redundancy. you clearly won't have time to look for redundancy in every construction of every answer choice; if you did, it would take an unbelievably long time just to do that (let alone to look for other types of errors).
however, if you realize that you only have to check for redundancy when certain words are missing from other answer choices -- after all, if a construction is redundant, than part of it will have to be removed in the correct choice -- then you can save a lot of time on that.

--

still, though, there are a couple of error types that are worth looking for in every sentence.

the first and foremost of these is parallelism. it's EXTREMELY important that you be able to locate parallel constructions -- if you don't realize that a construction is supposed to be parallel, then you may wind up treating it as two separate constructions (and thus not seeing what you're actually supposed to see).

it's also worthwhile to check for pronouns in every sentence, since they can't really hide those -- if there is a pronoun in the sentence, you're going to see it, and you can go check quickly for its antecedent.