The following is adapted from the book Language Arts Workbook for the GED Test. I highly recommend it for study, as it has plenty of realistic practice question with explanations.
- Main Idea: Identify the main idea of a paragraph or passage.
- Structural Relationships: Distinguish between cause-and-effect, compare-and-contrast, and parallel relationships. Follow the sequence of events in a story or article.
- Vocabulary: Use context clues to find the meaning and know the difference between connotation and denotation. Find the synonyms and antonyms for words.
- Figurative Language: Identify simile, metaphor and personification in a passage.
- Author’s Views: Find the author’s purpose tone and point of view.
- Rhetorical Techniques: Figure out how writers use analogies, enumeration, juxtaposition, parallelism, qualifying statement and repetition.
- Evidence: Find where an author uses facts, statistics, expert opinions and anecdotes in order to provide evidence for a claim.
- Opinion and Bias: Distinguish facts from opinions and identify a writer’s biases.
- Logical Fallacies: Find errors in the logic behind an author’s argument.
- Argument Structure: Identify the conclusion and supporting evidence in any given passage.
- Analyzing Data: Interpret charts and graphs.
- Perspective: Explain the difference in point of view between that of the author and that of the characters.
- Inference: Draw conclusions from a text’s information.
- Parts of Speech: Know the functions of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions.
- Subject-Verb Agreement: Write sentences in which the subject and verb agree, and edit those that do not.
- Pronoun Agreement: Construct sentences in which the pronouns agree with their antecedents. Fix mistakes in pronoun agreement.
- Pronoun Case: Use the subjective, objective and possessive pronouns correctly. Fix mistakes in pronoun case.
- Modifiers: Use modifiers in ways that are not dangling or misplaced.
- Capitalization: Learn the rules of capitalization and correct capitalization errors.
- Sentence Construction: Identify and correct sentence fragments and run-on sentences.
- Comma Usage: Use commas when needed and correct mistakes with missing or misplaced commas.
- Other Punctuation: Make sentences with the correct use of apostrophes, colons, and semi-colons. Use end marks and abbreviations appropriately. Correct and punctuation errors.
- Verb Tenses: Form simple, present perfect and past perfect tenses. Correct errors in verb tense.
- Parallel Structure: Make sentences with parallel structure and recognize sentences with errors in parallelism.
- Essay Structure: Use the proper structure for an effective essay.
