Lets try to solve the following Text Completion question.
Throughout his authorial career- from the publication and early works, such as The Sound and Fury, all the way to his last novel, the Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Reivers.. William Faulkner shunned ____________ sentences and would write an entire page without using a single period.A) Concise
B) Vague
C) Rambling
D) Controversial
E) LabyrinthineOk, we have here a very long sentence.So you may ask what does ETS want you to do. What are they looking for? What is it they want to test in you? In the previous strategies discussed we already know how to break down a long sentence and simplify it to find out clues more easily. In this kind of questions ETS wants you to brush through a lot of facts & figures (mostly garbage) and then find the clues.
Steps
The following steps will help you solve the problem-
1. Ignore the names, facts, figures (all unnecessary , just to distract you).
2. Break down the sentence.
3. Find the elusive clue.Lets go through the sentence again. After going through all those facts and figures about the author and his accomplishments we stumble on the key word of the sentence "
Shunned". It means avoiding something.
The author is avoiding some kind of sentences.
What kind of sentences?
Here lies the clue for solving the question. The author avoids writing some kind of sentences and instead he writes an entire page without using a single period...Whoaaaa!! Those are some long sentences. So what kind of sentences is he avoiding?
Obviously the opposite of long sentences. So the author is shunning short sentences.
Now you have a good idea what you are expecting. So lets evaluate the options and find the answer.
Evaluating Options
1)
Concise- It means short.Yes exactly we are looking for. So that's your answer.
But just to be sure you should always go through the rest of the options just to make sure.
There is another example posted below. Use this aforementioned strategy and find out the correct answer.