Sentence Correction

aspirant2011 wrote:The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors

A. convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors
B. convening a White House conference, to encourage Congress to appropriate more money for schools and for establishing networks of black mentors
C. convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and to establish networks of black mentors - missing AND
D. the convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors
E. for convening a White House conference, for encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors - missing FOR

between A and C. A is a parallelism list but there should be comma before "and establishing" to end the list.
that leaves "c"

aspirant2011 wrote:Why is C wrong??????isn't "to appropriate more money for schools and to establish networks of black mentors" this parallel...............

David@VeritasPrep wrote:I did a little research on the problem. This is what I found.

This is from Aristotle and it #33.

The sentence however, has been lifted entirely from the New York Times from November 9,2010 edition of that newspaper.
"The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors."

You will notice that, although this is a list of three things, the second comma is omitted and so it is not necessarily clear to those who are used to a comma before the "and."

This is a direct quote from the Aristotle website "Serial comma is never a must, which is exactly the point. Though the OG always uses one, it doesn't ever test you on the usage of one. However, in the updated edition (which should be out sometime in June) we will be using the serial comma just to maintain consistency with the OG."

I am glad to hear that this will be edited. This sentence was lifted directly from the New York Times and it was without the second comma, yet on the GMAT the second comma is always there.

So choice A is correct because the addition of the proper second comma makes this clearly a list of three things, "encouraging" "convening" and "establishing." The other choices are not parallel.

Without the comma C is still incorrect, however, as Frankenstein said, you would have to say "urges convening a white house conference AND encouraging Congress."