When he could no longer play violin himself, Howard taught,

Yes, the sentence makes complete sense. The latter half of the sentence "imparting his knowledge to students and encouraging" is actually a Verb-ing Modifier which is meant to modify the entire clause "He taught".

You could refer the below article for a better understanding on modifiers
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/modifiers ... orrection/




KUDOS please, if you like the post or if it helps

If I consider imparting knowledge and encouraging students as modifiers of Howard taught, option E seems correct.
However, consider this structure: Howard taught, imparting his knowledge to students and encouraged students... Here taught and encouraged should be parallel as in option D.
Is option D wrong because there is no comma after students? If there was a comma after students, would encouraged be considered parallel with taught?

Experts - Kindly comment if my understanding is correct. I faced a similar issue with another question. Any help here would be highly appreciated.

sayantanc2k mikemcgarry daagh egmat

himanshumalhotra1990 Mahmud6 There are a few problems with that interpretation of D.

First, yes, the lack of a comma is a problem. Without the comma, the word "and" clearly links the two adjoining items ("imparting" and "encouraged"). With the comma, we might in theory see "imparting his knowledge to students" as an aside between two parallel past tense verbs. However, this would still be ruined by the use of the pronoun "them." This clearly refers to the word "students" in the previous term. This links the two parts together, showing that the author's intent is for those two parts to work together. If we had any doubt, we might also notice that none of the other answer choices make "taught" and "encouraged" (or any form thereof) parallel. We'd only see a right answer that deviated from all the others if the other version had a clear flaw of meaning or grammar. To clarify the problem, simply take the proposed "modifier" out and see if the sentence still works:

When he could no longer play violin himself, Howard taught and encouraged them to be as successful as he once was.

Nope! We can drop D.

MANHATTAN REVIEW OFFICIAL EXPLANATION:

The sentence is not complete as it is written. There would have to be an ‘and’ between taught and imparted for it to be correct. B is incorrect as it unnecessarily repeats the subject by using ‘he’. Therefore you must use ‘imparting’. The final clause should have parallel structure within it. Therefore E is correct, not C or D. ‘Imparting’ and ‘encouraging’ are parallel.

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