quot;When my sister is sad, my friend is upset and confused,

Question

"When my sister is sad, my friend is upset and confused, or my thoughts are derailed by questioning and opposition from within themselves, things really become real"
Is there a parallelism error in the sentence in the underlined part ?
Source article: https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/a-perforating-doubt

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear piealpha , This is a difficult sentence, but I see no parallelism error. Here's how I parse the sentence When (1) my sister is sad, (2) my friend is upset and confused, or (3) my thoughts are derailed by questioning and opposition from within themselves, things really become real . The main parallelism in the sentence consists of the three clauses in parallel, all following the word " when ". The only independent clause in the sentence is the green part at the end. To rephrase what the author has written somewhat less eloquently, we could say: When my sister is sad, or when my friend is upset and confused, or when my thoughts are derailed by questioning and opposition from within themselves, things really become real. There is also parallelism with the prepositional phrase beginning with "by" --- " by questioning and opposition from within themselves " ---- admittedly, a strange existential statement that probably only a Harvard student could write, but grammatically, this is 100% correct, no flaw in parallelism at all. I guess my question for you is --- why do you believe there is a parallelism flaw? Mike :-)

piealpha · Answer

Thanks Mike for nice explanation. However, I am confused as the verb "derailed" uses participle "questioning" in conjunction with noun " opposition". Is it not strange, even if it is correct usage? Should a verb not followed by parallel participles ?

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear piealpha , This is a really tricky point. The -ing form of a verb can play three different roles (a) participle modifying a noun (analogous to an adjective) (b) participle as part of the progressive tense construction (functions as a verb) (c) a gerund , which plays a noun-role in a sentence. See this post for more on this distinction: https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/the-ing-form-of-a-verb/ Here, the word "questioning" is the object of the prepositional phrase "by", so it must be a gerund , not a participle. While it is non-standard ---- I have never seen it in official GMAT material ---- technically it is not grammatically incorrect for a gerund to be in parallel with a noun. It's not right enough to appear on the GMAT, but not entirely wrong either. " ... derailed by P and Q .... " That would make perfect sense if P & Q were both nouns or both gerunds --- either of those could appear on the GMAT. If one is a noun and one is a gerund --- well, that's somewhat non-standard, but not fully wrong, good enough to pass in somewhat informal conversation or writing, but not up to snuff for the GMAT SC. Does all this make sense? Mike :-)

piealpha · Answer

Thanks again to clarify. I got your point.

quot;When my sister is sad, my friend is upset and confused,

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