shanks2020
Hi
AndrewN EducationAisle GMATNinja egmat experts,
The below sentence I came across in 1 of the recent issues of The Economist :
Ms.Zimmerman, best known for "Metamorphoses", is assisted by a team of designers deserving of abundant praise, starting with Todd Rosenthal(scenery) and Ana Kuzmaic(costumes), both of whom have outdone themselves.
I have 2 doubts here -
1) How is verb-ing after comma, justified here? It neither shows a result of the previous nor the describes/how part of the previous clause. It is more of an examples of desginers.
2) Is "Of" necessary after deserving? I feel the sentence can be just fine even if we write - designers deserving abundant praise.
Hello,
shanks2020. The sentence is fine as written.
Deserving of is an idiomatic usage, similar to saying
worthy of. (You would not write,
worthy abundant praise.) As for the -ing phrase after the comma, I do not follow any prescribed method for testing such usage. You are correct: in the sentence at hand, it provides examples of designers, nothing more, and operates the same as
including. But keep in mind, your goal is to see whether the phrase connects logically to anything in the previous clause—it does here—and also, this is not a GMAT™ SC question. If it were, you would have five potential lines to compare to one another, so mulling over whether a single line in isolation is written perfectly may not be the best way to prepare for the GMAT™. With all of that said, I hope this response proves helpful. Keep an open mind on -ing phrases. I see too many people following so-called rules to nothing more than a wrong answer.
Thank you for thinking to ask me about the sentence.
- Andrew