The students did poorly on the test

[MichelleN]

Hi,

My question is reference to Problem 10 of Chapter 6 (page 91) of the 2007 Edition Sentence Correction guide.

The incorrect sentence is: "The students did poorly on the test more because they hadn't studied than not understanding the material.

The answer states that the correct sentence should be: "The students did poorly on the test more because they hadn't studied than because they didn't understand the material."

Could somebody explain why that parallel sentence structure is correct? To me, it seems as though "hadn't studied" and "didn't understand" are not parallel. I thought "hadn't studied" and "hadn't understood" would be a better parallel verb structure. Or do I just need to brush up on my grammar skills a little bit more...?

--Michelle

[varunrajwade]

These 2 are clauses... and the idea in SC ios to maintain paralelism in clause construction and not in the individual verbs or nouns or pronouns... Hence since both clauses have same basic construction of starting with because this option is correct..

[StaceyKoprince]

varunrajwade has it. You don't need to make every word in the entire phrase or clause parallel - you just need to make the main word in the phrase or clause parallel. This is often (but not always) the first word.

The basic idiom here is "more X than Y" and "because" introduces each clause: more because <of this> than because <of that>.

Note that we also have the idiom "because of" - that is, the preposition "of" should follow the word "because" - so the second word is also parallel here - but that's really due to the "because of" idiom.

ETA: certainly if they gave you an option that also made the verbs after that perfectly parallel, that would be fine - it's not wrong. But they wouldn't give you that kind of option plus the kind of option we wrote in the book, because neither one is grammatically wrong.

[rakesh.khatri]

Hi,

I have a question regarding the repetition of word "BECAUSE" to maintain parallelism. Is the following sentence correct?

The students did poorly on the test because MORE they had not studies THAN the material was difficult.

I have not repeated 'because' here.

IF this is wrong, does it mean that parallel subordinate clause should always repeat the subordinating conjunction? For example:
I want to retire to a place WHERE I can relax AND WHERE the taxes are low
They contended that the committee was biased AND that it should be disbanded.

Please clarify doubt in repetition of subordinating conjunctions to maintain parallelism.

Greetings
Rakesh

[tim]

every sentence that exhibits parallelism has a point at which the sentence splits into two parallel tracks. any word that occurs before that point should show up only once, but if it shows up after the break point it will need to be repeated once in each track. often a sentence can be written either way, but your specific example with "because" cannot because the way you wrote the sentence is simply not how "because" is used..