Introduction
Sentence correction is the skill of spotting what is grammatically or idiomatically wrong in an English sentence and rewriting it so that it becomes correct, clear and standard. In competitive exams (BCS Preliminary and Written, Bank Officer, IT-Officer and other government recruitment tests) this topic appears in two forms:
- "Find the error" — the sentence is split into underlined/labelled parts (A, B, C, D) and you choose the part that contains the mistake (or "No error").
- "Choose the correct sentence / correct the sentence" — four versions of a sentence are given and you pick the fully correct one, or a blank/underlined portion must be replaced by the best option.
This topic is high-yield: a strong candidate can score almost all of these marks because the errors come from a fixed, repeating set of grammar rules. Once you master the rule behind each error type, you stop guessing and start diagnosing. That is the goal of this lesson — to give you a rule for every common trap so you can explain why an answer is right, not merely feel it.
Learning objectives
After studying this lesson you should be able to:
- Identify the major categories of grammatical error tested in Bangladeshi government exams.
- Apply the rule of subject–verb agreement in all tricky situations (intervening phrases, indefinite pronouns, collective nouns, "either…or", etc.).
- Fix errors of tense and sequence of tenses, including the special rules after since, wish, and conditionals.
- Correct pronoun errors (case, agreement, ambiguous reference).
- Use articles, prepositions and appropriate prepositions correctly.
- Detect faulty parallelism, dangling and misplaced modifiers, wrong comparisons, and redundancy.
- Distinguish commonly confused word-pairs (its/it's, affect/effect, principal/principle, etc.).
- Work through exam questions with a systematic checklist instead of guessing.