doubt about semicolon

Question

Hi,
Say you have a pronoun in the independent clause after the semicolon. Can the pronoun refer to the noun in the independent clause before the semicolon?
Des the vice-versa also hold good?

Vercules · Answer

Yes it is possible,

John stood first in Maths test; he also won the second prize in debating.

here 'he' the pronoun in the second refers to the noun 'John' in the first clause.

If you use the same vice-versa the above sentence would sound awkward

eg He stood first in the class; John also won the second debating prize. -- awkward

The above construction is awkward if used as a single sentence, but it could very well fit in a paragraph. But in GMAT we have only one sentence per question, so it would be an awkward and a less preferred sentence.

Vercules

Sachin9 · Answer

It is awkward but is it incorrect grammatically and will it be wrong on gmat?

Vercules · Answer

Hi Sachin,

The sentence is not grammatically incorrect, it is less preferred. If you have the two options to choose from you will choose the first one. Moreover, you should keep one more thing in mind is that rules on ambiguous pronouns are not absolute on GMAT. ie a correct sentence may have a pronoun ambiguity, but it will be correct because it does not contain other noticeable errors that other choices may contain. If you just go by pronouns it could be really confusing at times. The good thing is that most pronoun questions contain other errors as well.

In most of the pronoun based questions POE works best.

Hope that helps,

Vercules

doubt about semicolon

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