Sentence Correction

1. Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.
2. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that worked well in the past, makes missing signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting ones likely when they do appear.
3. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.
4. Executives’ being heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes them likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting them when they do appear.
5. Being heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that has worked well in the past, is likely to make an executive miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that worked well in the past, makes missing signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting ones likely when they do appear.

An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.

Executives’ being heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes them likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting them when they do appear.

Being heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that has worked well in the past, is likely to make an executive miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

ketkoag wrote:Please explain why D is wrong..
is it because it is talking about employees that is plural?
please lemme know the error present in C.

lunarpower wrote:

Executives’ being heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes them likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting them when they do appear.

the apostrophe is perhaps not needed. Also concerned with "being"

you missed what is easily the most important problem with this part: the blatant lack of parallelism between "miss" and "misinterpreting".
these two ideas are clearly parallel, and they're presented in tandem, so they have to have parallel grammatical structures.

lunarpower wrote:

An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.

I think there is modifier issue in this choice

it's more the pronoun issue.

the best way i can explain it to non-native speakers of english is that "it" could potentially stand for "incipient trouble" and is thus ambiguous (especially in light of the fact that "incipient trouble" is WAY WAY closer to "it" than is the properly intended antecedent).

to any native english speakers reading this post, you should reflexively find ugliness in this pronoun. in other words, you just won't know what "it" is supposed to stand for, unless you go back through the sentence at least one more time and hunt for an antecedent.

lunarpower wrote: you have to use "one" to refer to SINGULAR NOUNS, ESPECIALLY NOUNS THAT ARE PRECEDED BY THE INDEFINITE ARTICLE ("A" / "AN").