Meltzer2 - Sentence and Paragraph Order
How should you approach add sentences questions? What are the three steps to approach add sentence questions?
It is also possible that you will be asked to identify where in a passage a particular sentence should be added. Unlike Yes/No sentence insertion questions, which normally deal with only a limited section of a passage or paragraph, these questions may ask you to consider various places in multiple paragraphs. Unless you happen to remember the passage exceptionally well, plugging the sentence into each spot listed in the answer choices and working by process of elimination is usually the most effective way to answer these question. That said, you can still follow some basic steps upfront to make the process go more smoothly and avoid confusion: 1) When you read the sentence to be inserted, take a moment and restate the topic for yourself. This will be the key word or phrase. 2) Then, when you go back to the passage to plug in the sentence, check to see whether the surrounding sentences are consistent with that key word or phrase. 3) Eliminate any answer inconsistent with that focus.
What do questions about paragraph order test? What are the three steps?
Questions about paragraph order are rare and do not appear on every test. That said, you should be comfortable working through them in case you do encounter one on the actual exam. These questions test the same essential skill as those testing sentence order, only on a larger scale. As is the case for sentence order questions, you must determine whether a particular paragraph is logically placed where it is, or whether it would make more sense elsewhere in the passage. While questions testing paragraph order ask you to consider more information than most other question types do, you do not need to reread the entire passage to determine whether the existing placement of a paragraph is correct. Rather, a few key places will usually give you all the necessary information. If you are comfortable trying to answer paragraph order questions on your own, you should break them into the following steps: 1) Reread the paragraph in question, paying particular attention to the first(topic) sentence. Reiterate the topic for yourself in a word or two, and jot it down quickly. 2) Back up and read the last sentence of the previous paragraph, and ask whether yourself whether it leads naturally into the topic of the paragraph in question. If it does, you're done. 3) Skim through each paragraph, looking for a mention of that topic. You do not need to read, just look for the word(s). The paragraph in question should belong next to that paragraph.
What do sentence and paragraph order ask you to identify? What should you do when you see a bracket?
Sentence and paragraph order questions ask you to identify whether a particular sentence is correctly placed within a paragraph, or whether a particular paragraph is correctly placed within a passage. The presence of bracketed numbers at the beginning of sentences signals that a question testing sentence order will appear, and the presence of bracketed numbers at the top of each paragraph signals that a question testing paragraph order will appear. Whenever you see one of these clues, pay close attention to the order of sentences or paragraphs as you read. If you are able to notice - and fix - potential errors before you even look at the questions, you can save yourself a lot of time.
How do you approach sentence order? What should you look for?
When you encounter a sentence order question, you should first determine the topic of the sentence in question. Then, ask yourself whether it follows logically from the previous sentence and connects to the following sentence. If not, reread the paragraph from the beginning, checking to see where else that specific topic appears. The sentence in question almost certainly belongs either right before or right after. Look for transitions, conjunctions, and important information.
