GMATPrep : When drafting the Declaration of Sentiments

Here's something that I've found to be generally true: when the entire sentence is underlined in SC, it's usually testing MODIFIERS and MEANING, because entire chunks of the sentence will move around, changing what is being modified. That is typically what I look for first.


(A) When drafting the Declaration of Sentiments that was adopted at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in 1848, included in it by the author, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a call for female enfranchisement.
- "when drafting" is an opening modifier; it should modify the SUBJECT of the main clause that come after it. In this case, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton..." should come directly after that phrase, and she should be the subject.
- "included in it by the author" is unclear & unnecessarily passive. Something like "E.C.S. called for..." would be more clear.

(B) Including a call for female enfranchisement, a draft of the Declaration of Sentiments was adopted at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in 1848 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote.
- "including a call... a draft... was adopted" is grammatically correct: the opening modifier correctly modifies the subject. E.C.S. would be a more active subject, but this isn't wrong.
- "that E.C.S. wrote" is incorrectly modifying the Convention, not the draft.

(C) When the Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton was adopted at the Seneca Falls Women's Convention in 1848, a call for female enfranchisement had been included in it.
- this answer choice is grammatically correct.
- however, "a call... had been included in it" seems strange - was it included by accident? Who included it? Because this wording is passive, we're missing important information.

(D) A call for female enfranchisement, included in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's draft of the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, that was adopted by the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention.
- this is a sentence fragment. It begins with "A call..." which is then modified by the prepositional phrase "included in...", which is in turn modified by the dependent clause "that was adopted..." There is no main verb.

(E) When Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments that was adopted at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in 1848, she included in it a call for female enfranchisement.
- correct! E.C.S. is the subject, and it's clear that she's the one who included the call for enfranchisement.

The answer is E.