bubbliiiiiiii wrote:Jim@Grockit wrote:The repetition of by indicates that the staying is not one of the services, but rather one of the means by which Acme has become so profitable. It is an important difference.
Hi Jim,
Firstly, thanks for taking out time and replying to this thread.
From the statement above, I understand that we use by to differente between the list of services and means of Acme becoming profitable.
I thought the usage of two
ands does that in the options.
and financial advice,
and staying
This one acts to maintain parallelism among the list of services.
while,
this one tries to maintain parallelism between the means by which Acme has become profitable.
Can you please clarify where my understanding goes wrong?
Also, can you please help me understand when to use reduntant
bys and when not to use?
I understand what you are saying, I think -- why doesn't a second
and, which shouldn't be there ordinarily, indicate that we have resumed the list of means by which Acme became profitable? The answer is, sadly, that very fact:
and goes before the final item in a list, and a second one after the final item causes readers momentary doubt about the structure of the sentence. A reader might ask himself or herself, "Did the list have compound entries that I missed? Does the writer not know what he or she is doing?", and the GMAT is trying very hard to break habits that cause those reactions.
Unfortunately, there is no specific word count or grammatical structure I'm aware of that will always guarantee the repetition of a preposition for the sake of parallelism. Note that in real English it's never wrong to repeat it; only the GMAT cares so much about concision that repeating a two-letter word like
by can cost you points. You can say
We got there by using maps and asking for directions or
We got there by using maps and by asking for directions.
The rule I use when I write (and do SC) is "Could the reader think something else is going on, grammatically? Could this be unclear?"; if the answer is yes, I make the parallelism more explicit or rewrite the sentence. I realize that may not be much help.
