Ecco recently published Joyce Carol Oates's Little Bird of H

https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-proper-use-of-participial-phrases-98333.html#p757784

This link has an excellent explanation by nusmavrik

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Kudos if this helps

I agree with Karna. The choice D has "it" point to non living thing, which in this case is the Book publish. So I thought that made number to 37.

Hello akhil911,

It seems that no one has gone through each answer to explain how to tackle this question, so let's do that!

The first main difference to deal with is the use of "it" in answers C & D. By introducing a pronoun into the sentence, we need to figure out what "it" is referring to. The only noun this could be referring back to is Ecco - and since Ecco is a person, we can't use "it" to refer to him/her. Therefore, let's rule out answers C & D because they include a vague pronoun.

Now that we're left with A, B, & E, let's figure out which verb tense makes the most sense to use here:

Ecco recently published Joyce Carol Oates's Little Bird of Heaven, bringing to 37 the number of novels Oates has written under her own name.

A. bringing

This is the CORRECT answer because it turns the phrase into a modifier, which is what it should be - it's just giving us "extra" information about how many books are published, and therefore isn't really critical information.

B. and bring

This is INCORRECT because it uses present tense, which doesn't match up with the earlier use of the past tense "published." Also, using "and" here changes the phrase from a modifier to a dependent clause, which tells us this is information that needs to stay (it doesn't).

E. and brought

This is INCORRECT because it uses plain past tense, which doesn't really fit well here - the number of published books as of today is still 37 (as far as we know). Also, adding "and" to the phrase suggests that Ecco personally delivered 37 published books somewhere, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

I hope this helps anyone who still needed more of an explanation for answering this kind of question!

Hi,
Can you please tell me how do we know if Ecco is a person and not a publication company?

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