Drawing on her roots in a society that has a strong tradition of story

Sorry that I'm late to the party on this one! My wife went into labor about two hours before this question was posted, and... well, I've been a little bit distracted. It turns out that caring for a newborn may or may not be more difficult than teaching sentence correction.

We also covered this question in a recent YouTube webinar on punctuation, so if you prefer your explanations in video form, feel free to head over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLAJ_drP8UM. The short version: don't overthink colons! All they do is introduce some sort of example, but I've never seen an official GMAT question that really requires you to worry about the nuances of colon usage. In the explanation below, you'll notice that there's no real reason to worry about the specifics of colon usage -- you can do just fine by focusing on other things.


The first thing that should jump out at you here is the word "both". For starters, it doesn't seem quite right to use "both" with "as well as." "Both" and "and" go much better together.

We can also complain about the use of the word "including" after the colon. There's absolutely no need for it, since the colon basically implies that a list of examples is about to begin. More on that in a moment.

Anyway, we can eliminate (A).

Let's line (B) and (C) up side-by-side, to make the differences clearer:

We're all good with the parallelism here: "both" and "and" need to be followed by two parallel elements. In both (B) and (C), we have: "both Indian and European..." The other bit of parallelism looks fine, too: "historical texts, legends, and even nursery rhymes..."

So the only difference is the inclusion of the phrase "these include." You could think of this in two ways: first, the colon already does the work of introducing examples, so "these include" is unnecessary. The second is simpler: even if you completely ignore the colon, you really can't come up with a good rationale for including the phrase "these include", since the meaning of the sentence is 100% clear without it. Basically, it's just extra words -- and since those "extra words" are the only difference between (B) and (C), you could just eliminate (C).


Several problems here: "both" doesn't play nicely with "as well as", and even if it did, the parallelism would still be a problem: "both from Indian as well as European..." Nope.

Plus, the "which" is really, really silly, because it implies that Namjoshi's writing includes historical texts, legends, and nursery rhymes -- and that's not the intended meaning at all. Those things are influences on her writing, not types of writing that Namjoshi engages in herself.

So lots of reasons to ditch (D).


This has exactly the same errors as (D), just with some different window-dressing: "both from Indian and European..." is not parallel, and using "that" still suggests that Namjoshi's writing itself includes historical texts, legends, and nursery rhymes. And again, that's not the intended meaning of the sentence: those are just influences on her writing.

So (E) is out, and (B) is our winner. And we didn't really even need to think all that hard about colons.