3) The verbs "enters" and "slowing" are not parallel. ^^ there's no reason why they should be parallel, since they aren't in a parallel construction. "slowing" is a modifier. modifiers NEVER have to be parallel to the stuff they modify. if we change "entering...&q...

i received a private message about this thread. 1) The word "when" is supposed to reference a specific time, but there isn't a specific time that oxygen enters a cigarette. ^^ not really. clearly, oxygen does enter a cigarette at some point in time. and, in a different context , this sort ...

thinking more generally— the above is a good example of why functional thinking is superior to "classification" into rigid categories. namely, thinking about "actions" is better than worrying about whether said actions are technically verbs. in fact, in the "blue sentence&...

nope, i wrote it correctly (although i do quite often reverse such things). the orange sentence is too hard to understand. when the reader sees the modifier, (s)he isn't going to readily connect it all the way back to the orange stuff on the left. any reader's natural instinct is to try to apply mod...

update:
never mind the request for a link. as it turns out,
* yes, that post is over 4 years old
* someone else already pointed out the same issue to me
* ... so i already edited the original post

here's the edited post:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/soar-t62473-15.html#280069

also— if the passage were discussing some part of the hotel through which everyone passes—e.g., how quickly the floor is worn down in the hotel's exterior doorways—THEN "older hotels are smaller" becomes a factor. i.e., since everyone must pass through the doors of the hotel at some ...

In GMAC materials, you'll routinely encounter sentences like the blue one. Although the orange sentence is technically ok, I very highly doubt that you would ever see anything like it in an official sentence, since it's stylistically poor writing. So, if you need a guessing method , you're probably ...