force5 wrote:Hi aspirant 2011
When you're trying to sort out parallelism, you need to think about meaning -- which ideas go together. Look at the sentence:
"Joan of Arc, a young Frenchwoman who claimed to be divinely inspired, turned the tide of English victories in her country by liberating the city of Orleans and she persuaded Charles VII of France to claim his throne."
So how did she turn the tide of English victories? By liberating the city of Orleans. Was persuading Charles VII to claim his throne part of "turning the tide of English victories," or was it another action that forms a pair with "liberated the city of Orleans"?
The meaning that makes the most sense is that she did two things:
1. she turned the tide of English victories [in other words, broke their winning streak and made things go the other way] by liberating the city of Orleans, and then
2. she persuaded Charles the VII to claim his throne.
It doesn't make as much sense to say that part of how she broke the English winning streak was by persuading Charles VII to claim his throne, and so it shouldn't be "persuading."
The verb "claimed" is irrelevant, because there's no way that that action forms part of a pair with any other action - the sentence isn't saying "she claimed to be divinely inspired, turned the tide..., and persuaded......"
Instead, "claimed to be divinely inspired" is just modifying Joan of Arc, and so shouldn't influence the forms of the later verbs.
One more thing...
If i consider liberating.... and persuading parallel... then liberating and persuading should be same part of speech.
liberating is an adjective here however persuading is not a noun here.
Hi Force5,
Thanks for this explanation, are there any other ways to identify the answer here than comprehending the meaning? I struggled with this one, because
in my mind, part of turning the tide of war could have been persuading Charles VII to claim his throne. There isn't enough context to refute that.
In order for the 2nd statement to be another action outside of turning the tide of war wouldn't it need to be "...and she also..." ?
Over all what I'm struggling with is, in these situations how to determine if parallelism needs to be had between turned and persuaded, vs. liberating and persuading.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!