Sentence Correction

Received a PM asking me to respond, in particular regarding C vs. E.

We've got a few layers here.

While some propose to combat X by J, others by K, and still others by L.

It appears that J, K, and L need to be parallel, right? But that's not a complete sentence - there's no independent clause up there! So A is out, and we need a new basic structure for the sentence.

The "While" part isn't underlined, so we're going to have: "While some propose to combat X by J, others" no matter what. We need something to "close" that off - make an independent sentence - after the comma.

While I normally study every night, last night I went to a movie instead.

Something like that.

C, D, and E all start with "suggest" - so we have "While some <do X>, others suggest Y. That's a good start - the "others suggest Y" part can be our independent sentence.

Then, of course, we have two things still to come - some people suggest one thing and other people call for something else.

D gives us "While some propose to combat X by J, others suggest K, and still others by calling for L." Nope. That "comma and" means the final two (K and L) should be independent clauses. The third one (L) isn't. Dump D.

Here's where the trickiness comes in. Some people above have been saying that we're required to have parallelism in this circumstance. It is true that "and" is a parallelism marker. "And" also performs other functions in a sentence. A "comma and" set-up is used to indicate that we're trying to connect two independent clauses. Do those two clauses need to be totally parallel? No, actually.

I went to the store yesterday, and I am going to the pool today. Are "went" and "am going" parallel? Nope. Is that sentence okay? Yes.

You could also view it as: well, the two are parallel, because they both start with the same subject: I. Sure. But then C and E are both okay here from that perspective, because they both use "others" as the subject.

Bottom line: the two verbs (suggest and call / are calling) don't actually have to be parallel here. So we should basically ignore that split - it doesn't matter.

The other split we have is: "the reduction of software prices for decreasing the incentive" or "reducing software prices to decrease the incentive"

Why are people suggesting "the reduction of / reducing prices?" In order to decrease the incentive. E gets that meaning across - we suggest reducing prices in order to decrease the incentive.

What does C mean? I'm not even quite sure. "The reduction of" is awkward, sure - so let's change that to reducing. Others suggest reducing prices for decreasing the incentive. If I suggest reducing prices for something, it sounds like I'm going to say what it is I'm reducing, not why I'm reducing it: let's reduce the prices for computers. But that isn't what I want to say. I want to say why I want to reduce the prices: in order to decrease the incentive.

Overall, the distinction between choices C and E feels just a bit "fuzzier" than what I'm used to now on official problems. I think that's probably a consequence of the fact that this is from a (very old) paper test. I'm not sure this is the best one to study (at least in terms of answer C).