"because there were almost no clergymen’s daughters."

EducationAisle MartyTargetTestPrep AndrewN
Wondering if you could help me understand this from a parallelism perspective? I was wondering what would be the parallelism marker here, which requires the cause and effect to be parallel? Does "because" trigger parallelism here? If so, could you please expand on the specific parallelism requirement here?

EducationAisle AndrewN

Thanks for your inputs. The plural with Austens makes complete sense now that you have explained it, but was confusing with "or" when I was solving the question, so I just wanted to see if parallelism could be an additional tool to attack questions like this where SV Agreement is not always clear, especially given the seemingly parallel structure of the subordinate clause with the right answer choice. But I guess parallelism is a non-issue here.

How do Know that Jane Austens is the original name or only Jane Austen.

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Skywalker18 The idea here is that there was no one like Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. From the context, one can guess that these women, unlike pre-Colette French writers, were not from aristocratic families. Rather, they were the daughters of clergymen. It would be like if you said "There are no Donald Trumps in my family." This would just mean that no one in your family is like that.

As for the conjunction "or" it does not create a plural compound subject, so we can't use S-V to eliminate C-E. The problem with most of the choices is the way the conjunction is used. We need to say that there was no one like any of these women. E implies that there was EITHER no Austen OR no Brontes. That's not what we want at all. B and C are simply saying that those actual women weren't present, and that isn't the point. (Also, the plural "Austens" doesn't work in B without the idiom "there were no X.") Then, to answer your question in 3, the parallelism of "not a Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters" is flawed. If we aren't talking about the actual Austen in the first part, we shouldn't shift to talking about the actual Bronte Sisters in the second. We could perhaps say "There was not a Jane Austen nor any Bronte sisters."

Before Colette, the female writers of France had been aristocrats, from Mme de Lafayette to Anne de Noailles; there were no Jane Austens or Brontë sisters, perhaps because there were almost no clergymen’s daughters.

(A) were no Jane Austens or
(B) were not Jane Austens or
(C) was not Jane Austen nor the
(D) was not a Jane Austen or the
(E) was no Jane Austen or no

Sir I think there might be one more issue with E - parallelism if off. E uses 'no' at the end (again).

Although it is helpful to know that the author's name is "Jane Austen," that knowledge is not required to correctly answer this question.

The key here is the split between "was" and "were." Because "the Bronte sisters" is plural, we know that the verb must be the plural "were." That rules out everything except (A) and (B), which both have "Jane Austens."

Side note: this is a somewhat unusual construction, in which the author mentions plural Jane Austens in order to make his/her point. I can't think of any other official questions with a similar issue, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I hope that helps!

Before Colette, the female writers of France had been aristocrats, from Mme de Lafayette to Anne de Noailles; there were no Jane Austens or Brontë sisters, perhaps because there were almost no clergymen’s daughters.

(A) were no Jane Austens or
(B) were not Jane Austens or
(C) was not Jane Austen nor the
(D) was not a Jane Austen or the
(E) was no Jane Austen or no

SC42561.01

Dear Art,
Reg your query



Before deciding the verb agreement, let's decide the order of the subjects first. The actual sentence is ' The sun or the plants 'were/was' there. 'There' is only a placeholder and not the actual subject.

Now it becomes easy to decide the verb; the verb should be the plural 'were' because 'planets' is the nearest subject before the verb and therefore the verb has to fall in line.