Okay, so in this lesson, we're gonna look at long triple blank sentences. Let's take a moment to look at the defining features of a long triple blank text completion question. The prompt will have 70 words or more, it's a good mark of when you're dealing with something long. Sometimes the prompt is gonna be one sentence, a very long one, but very often you'll see multiple sentences.

Sometimes the blanks are evenly distributed. Sometimes it's a bit uneven, as far as where you'll see the blanks placed in the prompt. Complex grammar, always, you're always gonna see that complicated grammar. Context found throughout the sentence or sentences, always, never stop hunting for context as you look for the answers here.

Difficult, pretty much almost always, just by virtue of the length of these prompts. With those basic key features in mind, let's look at a few tips and tricks for navigating these longer text completion questions. One thing you wanna do is when you're looking at the blank, look at the blank's immediate surroundings to start. And then if you don't find what you need immediately next to the blank, work your way outward.

Also, you want to look for chances to eliminate clearly wrong answers as early as possible. The sooner you can take care of the wrong ones, the easier it is to not get mixed up as you navigate these longer prompts. Mentally paraphrase the prompt as you go, so keep trying to put that prompt into your own words.

And then, double-check your comprehension as you go, and at the end, always making sure that you fully understand what you're looking at. Now, what's really important to remember too is that the strategies I've just outlined for you, they work on all triple blanks. But these strategies are especially important to carefully mind for these longer triple blank sentences.

Okay, so let's see if we can apply these tips and tricks to an actual practice question. So what I want you to do is to pause the video, take a careful look at this question, see if you can select the answers, and then we'll talk about the process. Welcome back.

Okay, so let's see how you did, let's take a look at this, apply the tips and tricks I talked about. And we'll get to the bottom of this sentence. So the sentence opens by saying it can be extremely, blank, for first time writers to realize that the ideas they are so proud are actually far less, blank. Let's look at the first blank first.

Okay, so it can be extremely, something bad. And how do we know this? Well, it says that the authors are so proud of something, but then they realize that actually, we have the shift word here, actually the writing is less something than they believed. So they're proud, but actually they get disappointed.

Well, alluring is very positive, that means very attractive. Galling is negative, that means emotionally upsetting. Bracing is basically positive. Bracing either means startling in a refreshing way, or it means protecting somebody from something bad. You're bracing yourself to deal with something bad and have a better way of dealing with it.

So bracing doesn't work either. Now, galling is the lowest frequency word here. But if you didn't know that it meant emotionally upsetting, you could still probably be okay here because the other two words offered up for this blank are more common. You should know what they mean and be able to get to galling by process of elimination.

So we've got one blank down, two more to go. So let's keep looking at this context and paraphrasing. So it can be really upsetting when these new writers realize that their ideas that they were very proud of are actually far less good, right? Because if you're proud of something, but then you realize it's less something, you realize it's less good and you're less proud.

That's what the context points to. Okay, so far less good in what way? Well, let's see if we can weed out anything that isn't clearly positive in blank two. Rigorous is absolutely positive in the context of writing. If your writing's rigorous, it's well thought out, that's good.

Precedented just means something else came before it. So if something is less precedented, it's more unique, fewer things have come before it that are like it. So that would actually be good, you want your writing to be unprecedented, especially if you're dealing with something fictional. Which will come in the context later, and we'll look at this later context shortly.

Because you want something new and unique that's gonna excite those readers. Novel, novel, as an adjective, means unique and special. So if they realize that their writing is less unique, less special, in the context of writing, it's definitely a bad thing. So we have rigorous and novel, and up to this sentence, the end of this sentence here, we don't know which one we want.

So let's see what they say next. It says that often a publisher, or even a friend, will point out something to the new author. What will they point out? They'll point out that a different creator previously used something, previously created something similar.

So you could still be a little tempted to do rigorous because you could say maybe you have to be rigorous to make sure your ideas aren't similar to anything else. But they're talking, if it were rigorous, it would be rigorously making sure you're unique. So that would still bring us back to novel. Novel is more on target because we're clearly talking about uniqueness.

Whether we're talking about something being rigorous is a little more open to debate. So we now have the second blank, nice. Okay, so it can be extremely upsetting when first time writers realize they aren't as unique as they thought they were. And then it says often somebody who knows them will point out that, hey, somebody else did it first, and that's upsetting.

Now it says this feeling stings even more intensely when. So what we have here is probably the description of a second situation. The first situation is somebody tells the writer, hey, somebody else already did this. But what's the second situation? What's a different situation that will bother the writer even more when they realize their ideas aren't as unique as they thought?

Well, it says this feeling is even more upsetting when the publication of a new writer's work, blank, that of a better-known author. So let's stop right there cuz we have a lot of extra context here, we can start eliminating things. So the new writer is feeling this intense sting. Well, we can actually eliminate belittles.

Belittles seems to match with stinging because we say, well, if something stings, maybe it stings because you're being belittled. But it's saying that this new writer is using their work to belittle a better-known, more established author. So the new writer isn't feeling the sting, the better-known author might be because somebody new is belittling them.

But the wrong person is being belittled, according to the blank, so that doesn't work. Okay, so precedes that of a better-known author. Does precedes work? Well, it feels like it maybe could, because we're talking about a different situation then when somebody else's work precedes there.

So maybe their work precedes somebody else's. But how would that work? Well, let's look at context a little bit more. When a writer's work precedes that of a better-known author, the public mistakenly, erroneously thinks that the lesser known writer's work is derivative, that means not unique.

So the writer's work came first than a better-known author. But because the better-known author's more famous, the public makes a mistake and says, hey, that writer must be imitating the better-known author. Even though they couldn't be imitating them because their work came first. Well, that would be very frustrating, wouldn't it? So precedes seems like it works.

What about elaborates upon? Well, if somebody's work elaborates upon better known work, than it actually is derivative. And it wouldn't be a mistake, it wouldn't be erroneous to say it's derivative, so that doesn't work. Now, to sum up what this sentence means, it's very upsetting when first time writers realize that their ideas aren't as unique as they thought.

Sometimes this happens when somebody points out to them that a different author had already used ideas similar to theirs. Other times this feeling is even more upsetting because their ideas were first, then somebody else came up with the ideas, making their ideas less unique. But the public actually thinks that their ideas came second and were the ripoff. So that would be even more upsetting.

So we have summarized this completely, we've checked our comprehension along the way, we've looked for context clues, we've eliminated wrong answers as we need to. We've used these tips and tricks to successfully navigate this practice.