Error spotting tips
The questions of error detection test a candidate’s overall knowledge of English grammar. To score well in this section you need to acquire a sound knowledge of following 7 topics-
1. Parts of speech
2. Articles
3. Tenses
4. Phrasal verbs
5. Modifiers
6. Structure of sentence (parallelism) and
7. Spellings
Students, during topic wise practice questions, it is easy to score high as you are aware of the point that the questions question focuses on particular set of concepts. But, in the exam, when questions come from different topics and concepts, you find them difficult to answer.
For scoring well in this section, you need to have an approach that allows you to scan for the common errors and the concepts that they are based on. This however becomes much more difficult under time pressure.
So, here I am providing you with the instructions to solve questions based on “Error detection”.
1 - Divide the sentence into multiple parts and then check for errors. This would help you to look at the error much faster.
2 - Recognize the subject in the sentence and check whether the verb agrees with it or not.
3 - Look for the tense of the verb. Check if the usage of the tense and the verb forms of the tense are reliable with the sentence. In case of intricate sentences, look for the uniformity of the tense of the verbs throughout the sentence. You cannot have one verb in present tense and another in past.
4 - Look for the correct forms of the adjectives and adverbs. Remember, adjectives and adverbs are modifiers. You need to place them before the word they modify.
5- Check the usage of articles (a, an, the).
6 - Look for any discrepancy in the usage of prepositions. This is one of the most important topics. Pay special attention in the usage of prepositional phrase.
For instance, he congratulated me for my success. (incorrect). It should be, he congratulated me on my success.
7 - If you have not identified any error in any of the above steps, check for issues related to parallelism and redundancy.
These 7 tips will help you identify the common mistakes. This will help ensure that you are going with a proper approach in a systematic way.
Hope!! This article will help you in tackling questions of error spotting. 
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