katesizon wrote:
Literacy opened up entire realms of verifiable knowledge to ordinary men and women having been previously considered incapable of discerning truth for themselves.
(A) having been previously considered incapable of discerning truth for themselves
Hello Dear Experts!
Can you please explain why "A"is a wrong answer?
Having been considered without comma modifies preceding noun "men and women", and that participle is an analogous to a verb in the Past Perfect tense and in the Passive voice.
It seems grammatically better to use a relative pronoun "who" to refer to "men and women", but I cannot articulate why exactly B is a better choice and how to decide between "having been considered" participle and other choices later.
Thank YOU!
Choice (A) is a tough one to eliminate, so don't beat yourself up too much about this one!
First, take a look at this "having + verb" example (stolen from
one of our crusty old chat transcripts):
"Having eaten dinner already, Amber immediately began drinking heavily at the dinner party."- As stated in the chat, this one gets the timeline right. Amber ate dinner first, and then started drinking at the dinner party. That’s perfectly fine logically.
- Also, notice that the "having + verb" construction logically modifies the main clause. It tells us what Amber had already done BEFORE she started drinking heavily.
In choice (A), the timeline isn't really an issue -- the ordinary men and women were considered incapable BEFORE literacy opened up entire realms of verifiable knowledge.
But notice that the "having been" construction in (A) doesn't modify the main clause. Instead, it modifies an object of the main clause (an indirect object, actually -- literacy opens up realms to whom? To the ordinary men and women).
Unlike the Amber example above, the "having + verb" construction in (A) does NOT tell us what the noun (ordinary men and women) had already done (or been) before doing something else. Instead, it tells what the ordinary men and women had been before the LITERACY did something else.
That's certainly not a concrete error (so, no, please don't ask if we can make up some rigid rules about when "having + verb" works and when it doesn't!). But the fact that the "having been" doesn't describe the main clause in (A) makes the intended meaning somewhat unclear in this case. The meaning is much clearer in (B), where we have a noun modifier ("who...") describing the ordinary men and women. That makes (B) a better option.
Also, the use of "previously" doesn't make as much sense in (A). (Check out the bottom of
this post for our defense of the "previously" in B.) The "having + verb" modifier is trying to tell us that the ordinary men and women had been incapable before literacy opened up realms. The addition of the word "previously" in (A) makes the reader wonder, "well, were they incapable
just before literacy opened up realms? Or at some point
even further back on the timeline?"
In other words, if we go back in time and observe the ordinary men and women before literacy opened up realms, would we describe them as incapable? Or
previously incapable? There's a subtle difference in meaning, and that gives us another vote against (A).
I hope that helps!