Anshul1223333 wrote:
please review my understanding below:
A. Rather than accept the conventional wisdom that the earth was flat, Christopher Columbus was sent by the king and queen of Spain to see if he could reach India by traveling west.
[It is ambiguous who didn't accept the conventional wisdom. King and Queen OR Christopher Columbus]
Not ambiguous. Columbus is THE (only) subject in this sentence, so Columbus is the only possible grammatical subject for the verb
accept. (Moreover,
Rather than accept... is an initial modifier, whose referent follows immediately—a rule that also points to "Columbus".)
The phrasing of this sentence doesn't make sense, though. The passive voice ("was sent") indicates something that was done TO / imposed UPON Columbus BY someone else—in this case, the king and queen—so that verb can't sensibly be written as something that Columbus did "rather than" doing something else.
Quote:
B. Rather than accepting the conventional wisdom that the earth was flat, Christopher Columbus was sent by the king and queen of Spain to see if he could reach India by sailing west.
[do we need to compare -''accepting'' and ''was sent'' to be parallel
Yes, "rather than" should be a parallel marker. The _ing form isn't parallel to the other part, so, this one's gone.
By the way, I don't like the look of this modifier ("Rather than" + verb) at the beginning of a sentence. I'm pretty sure GMAC would do no such thing in a correct sentence.