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25 Jun 2014, 09:59
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Hey Mike,
hope you are doing great as you usually do
Look what i found today -- FIRST PARAGRAPH OF NYT
College and university leaders have been up in arms since President Obama announced last year that the administration would soon deploy a rating system that evaluates schools based on factors like affordability, graduation rates, student earnings and how well institutions serve low-income students. A PERFECT PARALLELISM ERROR. You may also check it right here - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/opini ... ef=opinion.
WHAT is your comment on this. I am switching to WSJ, something more reliable. if i am correct, it is possible because of your blog, and if not, then i should go back to basics.
In one of comment, you said preposition phrases can be in parallel with adverb, but i have hardly seen any such arrangement anywhere. It is possible only when both are prepositional phrase adverb.
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-gramm ... rb-tenses/
And, i have never seen a passive clause in parallel with an active clause, if we avoid condition when both have common subject. Am i correct?
Elements of style is a great book by the way. A great advice, Mike.
Thank you
Neha
hope you are doing great as you usually do
Look what i found today -- FIRST PARAGRAPH OF NYT
College and university leaders have been up in arms since President Obama announced last year that the administration would soon deploy a rating system that evaluates schools based on factors like affordability, graduation rates, student earnings and how well institutions serve low-income students. A PERFECT PARALLELISM ERROR. You may also check it right here - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/opini ... ef=opinion.
WHAT is your comment on this. I am switching to WSJ, something more reliable. if i am correct, it is possible because of your blog, and if not, then i should go back to basics.
In one of comment, you said preposition phrases can be in parallel with adverb, but i have hardly seen any such arrangement anywhere. It is possible only when both are prepositional phrase adverb.
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-gramm ... rb-tenses/
And, i have never seen a passive clause in parallel with an active clause, if we avoid condition when both have common subject. Am i correct?
Elements of style is a great book by the way. A great advice, Mike.
Thank you
Neha
25 Jun 2014, 14:53
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neha338
Neha,
What you found there is certain an error on a few counts --- using "like" to list examples is in my mind the big error. It should be "... factors such as affordability, ..."
What is tricky about the parallelism problem you point out is: it's not at all clear to me what a better way to say this same thing would be. Logically, all the other factors (affordability, graduation rates, student earnings) are equivalent to the noun phrase "how well institutions serve low-income students:" logically, the parallelism is perfect. Part of the problem is there is simply no single word or term that means "how well institutions serve low-income students." Because of that, I would say: the parallelism is not quite up to GMAT standards, but I think it would pass as acceptable only because there is no feasible alternative to saying what that sentence is trying to say.
I would urge you to be discerning but not puritanical. Don't hold the expectation that any of these reading sources (a) will be perfect, or (b) will conform to exact GMAT standards. Grammar is a huge controversial topic, and within this vast world, the GMAT SC standards are one small little enclave. Do not expect every sentence in the NYT or the WSJ to be a sentence that could appear on the GMAT SC. Among other things, there are all kinds of issues, such as the issue in this sentence, that the GMAT would never even touch. The GMAT gives you, as it were, a hygienic version of the language, so that you (and it) are not forced to deal with certain issues. A newspaper does not have that luxury: it has to discuss anything that actually happens in the world. The value of reading these source is to build your intuition for language and grammar and inflection and meaning. You are reading to exercise your right-brain pattern-matching abilities. Don't get fixated exclusively on your left-brain rules during this process, or you will miss the entire point. If you think about grammar only as a collection of rules, you will never understand it.
You also asked: "And, i have never seen a passive clause in parallel with an active clause, if we avoid condition when both have common subject. Am i correct?
My friend, please please remember to capitalize the first-person singular pronoun "I." I find this question very strange because if two clauses are in parallel, and both modifiers, then when would they not modify the same subject?? At any rate, the clause you highlight in blue is NOT in parallel to any other clause in the sentence: the clause "how well institutions serve low-income students" is a noun-clause, a substantive clause, and it meant to be in parallel to the other nouns.
...based on factors such as
//affordability,
// graduation rates,
// student earnings
and
// how well institutions serve low-income students.
Those are precisely the more subtle issues on which you need to improve ---- identifying exactly how parallelism does and doesn't work, for example. A left-brain, intuitive, pattern-matching skill, not a clear-cut rule-based distinction.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
25 Jun 2014, 23:09
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mikemcgarry
I agree with you. I just sorted this NYT on basis of logic that a caluse can never be in parallel with a phrase. Now i knew things better that English doesn't work like Maths as in this sentence where we are left with no other alternative to express ourselves.
My second doubt is on active and passive clause (i should have mentioned "predicate part instead of clause in my first post). I think they should not come in parallel joined by "and" conjunction, looks awkward.
Neha
