10 Tips to GRE Sentence Completion

The GRE sentence completion tests your ability to recognize logical consistency and grammatical correctness. Here are ten tips to handle these types of questions.

The sentences may come from any field of study like history, art, science, humanities and literature. No need to get anxious if the sentence deals with an unfamiliar subject. GRE is not intended to test your subject knowledge.

1. Try to grasp the tone of the sentence. Many a times the conclusion of a sentence strongly depends on whether the intent is an irony, fact or satire. The skill to identify such a tone will come with due practice.
2. Try to break down the sentence into smaller segments and try to understand the crux of the matter. Once you have understood the author’s intent, it becomes easier to come to a logical conclusion.
3. Pay additional attention to connectives such as either, or, along with, hence, thus, etc. These can influence the structure and meaning of the sentence a great deal.
4. If the meaning of the sentence is easily understood, try to write down your own answer on the scribble pad before looking at the answer options. This makes it easy to arrive at the final answer choice.
5. Even if you are a 100% sure of your answer, ensure that you read through all the answer choices before marking the answer. Test takers usually succumb to such traps.
6. If the sentence is too complex to comprehend and you have only a vague idea of what is being said, try to look at the answer options to derive additional meaning. At times answer options greatly assist in discovering the complete subject matter.
7. Once you have arrived at the answer, give the question another 15 seconds and try to eliminate the remaining answer options. In this way you will ensure that you have done due diligence with the question.
8. Beware of words that convey a contrasting meaning or a near antonym. They may form a small part of the sentence but have a potential to completely change the meaning of the sentence. Some examples of such words are nevertheless, notwithstanding, rather than, yet and still.
9. Treat the sentence completion section like just another reading comprehension. The answer to the question lies in understanding the information provided and not on any prior knowledge. Good reading habits will go a long way in making one better prepared to handle GRE sentence completion questions.
10. Relax! Remember to take a deep breathe and give yourself a breather if you are stuck.