Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton, and which was first printe

A and D are same wrt meaning , only difference is placement of modifiers which is also separated properly by 'comma' then why not D?

Because in option D the 2 modifiers are separated by "and" and considering parallelism, if the first modifier starts with a verb i.e. Written the second modifier should also start with the verb i.e printed
Hope this helps.


Please hit kudos if you liked the explanation.

We cannot say that D is wrong grammatically.
B and D convey same meaning but B is slightly better construction than D.
In D, the subject (Jurassic Park) comes into picture after 2 continuous modifiers. This kind of construction,although not wrong, is not preferred in GMAT.

If B were not in the options list, D could have been the next choice


Sent from my iPad using GMAT Club Forum mobile app

Hi Valardohaeris,

While I agree with you that D is correct grammatically and that both B and D convey the same meaning, I don't completely agree that placing 2 back to back modifiers is a problem with the GMAT. Let me quote an official sentence here (OG 12; Q44), which is the correct answer for its corresponding question:

Seldom more than 40 feet wide and 12 feet
deep but running 363 miles across the rugged
wilderness of upstate New York, the Erie Canal
connected the Hudson River at Albany to the
Great Lakes at Buffalo, providing the port of New
York City with a direct water link to the heartland
of the North American continent.

As you can see, the long modifying phrase in the beginning has two contrasting components, and the subject comes after this phrase - the phrase itself may seem odd initially. But it is indeed the correct answer. Now, I know that you said that D would have been the answer, had B not been there, but in essence mostly when GMAT gives preference to one construction over the other, the logic is quite understandable.

However, in the question at hand, I can't seem to understand the preference one bit. I would be really interested to see what the OE is in the source. My experience with official questions tells me that this question in its current form is not representative of the kind of decisions one has to make while choosing one choice over the other in actual GMAT questions. Of course there is the other possibility that I have actually missed something in the question.

Cheers!

Hope it helps

Alright, so this is my explanation:

B is correct: the subject and modifier are correctly placed (", written by Michael Crichton and first printed in 1988," describe Jurassic Park, which is (present tense) a novel.

D is wrong: Verbs "written" and "first printed" are not parallel in the first part of the sentence "Written by Michael Crichton and first printed in 1988" i.e. either it should "Originally written in....and first printed in ....." or it should be "Written in....and printed in .....".

There have been plenty of cases where GMAT has used similar construction to that of "D".

If D is wrong for this reason, why isn't B wrong for the same reason?