Not just....but also OG12-Q83

Hi Navami,

All of the following idioms are fine:

not only... but also... (e.g. "She's not only kind, but also intelligent.")
not just... but also... (e.g. "She's not just kind, but also intelligent.")
not simply... but also...
not merely... but also...

Furthermore, the word "also" is optional in all of these: it would be perfectly logical to say "She's not only kind, but intelligent."

However, your

2. not... but also

won't work -- not because it's not idiomatic, but rather because it's not logical. If I'm going to use the word "also," I need to be introducing a second thing after I've already said one thing is true. But if we were just to say "she's not kind, but also intelligent," we haven't listed a first trait for our "she" to warrant the "also" popping up later, since if she's NOT kind, the only trait we HAVE given her is "intelligent." In contrast, in the examples above that do work, the "not" is negating the "only" or the "merely" or the "simply" or the "just" -- it's not negating the adjective "kind." So in those, "kind" is trait #1, and as such, we can use "also" to introduce trait #2.

Make sense?

Ashley Newman-Owens
GMAT Instructor
Veritas Prep

Thanks Ashley!

thanks for detailed explanation.

Question: Can Nither .. nor be written as Not .. NOR. for example :

New York’s authorities have not shirked from arresting the head of one of the world’s leading international bodies, nor from demanding that he be kept in jail on remand.

I could not find supporting evidence in OGs but if i face this in the exam, what should determine my decision ?

Hmm... in most cases with a "not" in place, I'd just use "or," e.g. "I do not like pickles or onions." BUT if I were balancing two complete negative clauses -- e.g. "I do not like pickles" and "I do not enjoy onions, either," I might very well combine them like this:

I do not like pickles, nor do I enjoy onions.

As far as the question of what you are allowed/required to do goes, people will disagree with each other, but the Oxford English Dictionary's page on "nor" suggests that you can basically always get away with using the "nor" -- even sometimes if there isn't a "not" -- and it just sort of comes down to the fact that you'll sound like a seventeenth-century poet lots of the time if you do so.

In my own writing, I stick mostly to using "or" unless I have either a "neither" justifying the presence of a "nor" or two complete negative clauses wanting to be linked with a "nor." But whether you use "nor"s in other situations is mostly a matter of personal preference, and you can find support in various sources for whatever you decide (and, doubtless, you can also find sources saying that whatever you've decided is emphatically wrong!).

I am VERY confident the GMAT will not force you to make a decision with respect to "not...nor," since not much can be definitively considered wrong with respect to that construction. Hypothetically, if it did come up, you'd employ the strategy that really applies to all SC questions: if there are two options both free of grammar errors, your last-resort focus should shift to style. If there were a sentence that sounded better (e.g. one that used the more standard "neither...nor" about which you had no doubts), you'd pick that sentence. If there were no better alternative, you'd pick the sentence with the questionable-sounding "not...nor."

Cheers,