How to Approach Sentence Completion Questions

The sentence completion questions on the GRE are, for the most part, long and complex. Each of these questions takes the form of a sentence that is missing either one or two words, represented by blanks. Over half of them are missing two words. Occasionally, you may have a sentence with one blank, which will be completed by a phrase rather than a single word. You will have five answer choices, a-e, and you must determine which choice best completes the sentence. 

Sentence completions test two separate aspects of your verbal skills your vocabulary and your ability to follow the internal logic of sentences. At first glance, these sentences can seem quite daunting. Fortunately, there are strategies that can greatly increase your score on these questions. 

When you learn a new word, try to use it in conversation as soon as possible. As they say, Use a word three times, and it s yours  

The single most important key to the meaning of a sentence is its structure. The best and easiest way to determine sentence structure is to look at punctuation. Sentence completion questions always have one or more commas or semicolons. The basic strategy is to separate the sentence into units divided by punctuation. Often, one of the units will express a complete thought, and at least one unit will have one or two blanks. The unit that expresses a complete thought will tell you what the unit(s) with blank(s) need to say. 

For example, consider this sentence from the pretest  

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