A work with merits, The History of the United States (1801-1817), whic

Dear robu,

I'm happy to respond. In writing this question, I was striving to model the kinds of splits we see in official SC question. In some harder questions, there are incorrect choices similar to (A) here---choices that technically are 100% grammatically correct, but a bit long-winded, a bit awkward, a bit less than rhetorically ideal.

You see, the SC is not merely about grammar. As thangvietnam indicated above, logic is also important. I would say that rhetoric is also important. Rhetoric is a very hard aspect of language to appreciate: how effectively is an action conveyed? How forceful and interest-catching is this particular phrasing?

Consider option (A). It is 100% grammatically correct: grammar is not the issue at all.
(A) A work with merits, The History of the United States (1801-1817), which Henry Adams thought was his masterpiece, has been neglected, and therefore, ironically, it is not as popular as his memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, which he merely intended as a private publication for friends and which, after his death, went on to win numerous accolades, such as the Pulitzer Prize.

Think about the core sentence without the modifiers:
The History of the United States (1801-1817) has been neglected, and therefore, ironically, it is not as popular as his memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams.
The subject, the "actor" of the sentence is the book. It makes sense for a book to be the subject of a sentence if we are not talking about the author at all, or if the author has a relatively passive role in the sentence. Here, the sentence is telling us a great deal about what the author, Henry Adams, thought and intended, but all this action of the author is curiously relegated to the modifying clauses, while the main clause is this passive yarn about the book itself. All the exciting and noteworthy information is relegated to the clauses, and the boring factual stuff is made the focus of the sentence: why do that? Also, the "and therefore" is not the best way to present the contrast that the sentence wants to create. This version is somewhat awkward, somewhat indirect, not a way of saying the information that packs a wallop. If there were no better answer, perhaps this could pass as a correct answer, but we really hope to find something better.

By contrast, here's the OA:
(E) Henry Adams thought that his The History of the United States (1801-1817) was his masterpiece, but despite its many merits, this work has been neglected; ironically, his memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, intended merely as a private publication for friends, became a classic after his death, winning numerous accolades including a Pulitzer Prize.
The first clause start out with author Henry Adams as the actor, which makes more sense: he had the brains behind these books! The semicolon neatly divides the sentence into two separate and contrasting clauses, so that the strong grammatical break reflects the strong logical break. Also—and this is extremely subtle—for the part in which Henry Adams was living, he was presented as subject and actor, but for the information after he had died, his book was the subject of a passive verb—the verb voice mirroring the events of history (i.e. when people are living, they are actors; when they are dead, their words and memories receive passively receive the judgments of others). Again, that's an extremely subtle point, but these are the kinds of things on which writers focus to create rhetorical effects: a deep coherence between the grammatical structures, the logic, and the meaning. This version has that coherence in spades, while version (A) is an incoherence mess at that sophisticated level of analysis.

You see, we have to bring several different levels of analysis to GMAT SC. The GMAT punishes too literal a reading precisely because those who can read between the lines suffer loss after loss in the business world. Like the business world itself, the GMAT SC demands many many levels of intelligence to succeed.

Does all this make sense?
Mike