It was only after Katharine Graham became publisher of The Washington Post in 1963 that it moved into the first rank of American newspapers, and it was under her command that the paper won high praise for its unrelenting reporting of the Watergate scandal.

A It was only after Katharine Graham became publisher of The Washington Post in 1963 that it moved into the first rank of American newspapers, and it was under her command that the paper won high praise

B It was only after Katharine Graham's becoming publisher of The Washington Post in 1963 that it moved into the first rank of American newspapers, and under her command it had one high praise

C Katharine Graham became publisher of The Washington Post in 1963 and only after that did it move into the first rank of American newspapers, having won high praise under her command

D Moving into the first rank of American newspapers only after Katharine Graham became its publisher in 1963, The Washington Post, winning high praise under her command

E Moving into the first rank of American newspapers only after Katharine Grahame's becoming its publisher in 1963, The Washington Post won high praise under her command

2 things: first, please remember to use the correct subject (first 5-8 words of the problem) and, second, please give us some specifics about whatever troubled you on this problem. Thanks!

B uses past perfect incorrectly (simple past for "it was only after" and past perfect for "it had won high praise" which comes later chronologically than when KG became publisher)

C has a problematic pronoun (it) - logically refers to Wash Post but structurally could refer to KG or publisher. Also, this sentence indicates that it moved into the first ranks as a result of having won high praise. The original sentence doesn't indicate that meaning and we can't just change the meaning of the sentence.

D is a sentence fragment - there's no verb for Wash Post, which is the ostensible subject.

E "moving" and "becoming" indicate something that's going on right now - this should be in the past. And "after Katherine Graham's becoming its publisher" is horrible.

That leaves us with A (where the second "it" pronoun is fine, by the way, because both logically and structurally it refers to Wash Post).

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT

Can the pronoun "IT" in the answer choice A refer to two different things?
It was only.....(IMPERSONAL)
it moved into the first.....(The WP)

I thought that any pronoun can not change its referent! Could you explain?

ah yes, good question.

there is an EXCEPTION to the principle that a pronoun must stand for an actual noun.
here is that exception:

in the construction
it is/was ADJ that...
or
it is/was ADV that...
or
it is/was ADVERB PHRASE that...
the "it" DOES NOT have to stand for an actual noun.

note that the "THAT" after the adjective/adverb/adverb phrase is absolutely necessary.

in this problem, "only after Katharine Graham became publisher of The Washington Post in 1963" is an adverb phrase, so this is the sort of construction in which IT doesn't have to stand for anything.

this is a complicated sentence, but you've probably seen the same principle at work in simpler sentences, such as
it is unlikely that he will show up on time.

same sort of deal here.

Hi Ron,

Can we select A because it is the only answer choice that has two clauses parallel to "and"? Under timed conditions, I think this can be an effective way.

Thanks!

i'm of two conflicting minds in answering this sort of question, so i'll give you both sides of the issue.

1)
in this problem, you are definitely right in a certain sense: namely, the two clauses in choice (a) are much MORE parallel than are the clauses connected by "and" in the other two choices (b) and (c). (note that the word "and" is not present at all in the last two choices.)

in general, the choice in which you notice the strongest parallelism is very likely to be correct.
i know that this might sound like a statement of the obvious, but it really isn't: it's not unreasonable to think that they might include sentences that have perfect parallelism but other grammatical errors (which would therefore be incorrect), alongside choices with slightly worse parallelism but without those fatal errors.
if those problems were to exist, and especially if they were common, then your criterion would become a lot less reliable. empirically, however, i just haven't noticed that many of those problems -- so, at the end of the day, your criterion is probably going to be fairly reliable.

still, you definitely can't use that sort of thing as an absolute criterion. keep in mind the following:

2) PARALLELISM DOESN'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT -- ESPECIALLY IF THE PARALLEL STRUCTURES ARE LONG
if you have really short parallel structures, such as prepositional phrases, infinitives, or verbs, then it's reasonable to expect those structures to be perfectly parallel.
however, you're going to have to allow for a little bit of variation between parallel structures that are very long. for instance, if entire clauses are placed in parallel, it's unreasonable to expect that those clauses should be structured in exactly the same way.
if you think about the way that language is structured, you should quickly come to the conclusion that this would be unreasonable.

the upshot for this particular problem is that, although the parallelism in (a) is a bit more exact than that in (b) and (c) -- note that both sentences start with "it was" -- the latter two options are NOT incorrect based on parallelism alone. in those two choices, the word "and" still connects two clauses; it just happens that those clauses are constructed with a greater difference between them than in choice (a). the reasons that they are actually INCORRECT are other errors, not parallelism, in this case.
still, your criterion is certainly not useless -- notice that if you guessed based on it, you would get this problem correct.

also, just as importantly,
3) if a parallel structure is present in some of the choices and completely absent from other choices, you can't eliminate the choices from which it is absent!
the reason i'm saying this is because it appears that you actually got rid of (d) and (e) simply because they didn't contain the word "and".
if that's the case, then you got really lucky -- you can't kill a choice just because it doesn't contain a particular structure.
for instance, check out problem #36 in the FIRST edition verbal OG supplement (the prompt begins with "what was as remarkable..."; i can't reproduce it here). in that problem, a few of the choices have issues with nonparallel verbs, but the correct answer actually doesn't include the parallel verbs at all (one of the verbs is omitted entirely). if you were to use the same sort of reasoning on that problem, you would strike out the correct answer before even checking it out.

Hi Stacey/Ron,

Can you please show how the second "it" structurally refers to Washington Post?.

It was only after Katharine Graham became publisher of The Washington Post in 1963 that it moved into the first rank of American newspapers

In the preceding clause - Katharine Graham is the subject.
Publisher - object (Am i right here?.What is the role of Y in the construct "x became y")
Washington Post - Object of the preposition.

The strucuture is similar to "X became Y that it moved into the first rank of American newspapers..........".

"it" should refer to X structurally,rt?.
How does "it" refer correctly to "Washington Post"?

too much thinking.

there's only one eligible noun; i.e., there's only one noun that is both singular and not a person, as required by the pronoun "it".

if there's only one eligible noun, then the pronoun stands for that noun.
period, end of story.

--

by the way, you shouldn't really have to think about this sort of complexity anyway, even if the pronoun is ambiguous. here's a better way:
post40400.html#p40400

(note that you don't have to bother with this reasoning here, since this pronoun is not ambiguous.)

Is "Katharin Graham's becoming" is right?

even i eliminated 2 options based on 's followed by -ing .
But since neither Ron nor Stacey mentioned about the same , I am not sure if i was on the right track .

Ron ,
Can you help please ?

this type of stuff -- "awkwardness" and so on -- is the sort of thing that you want to judge comparatively, not absolutely. in other words, you should reach judgments about things like this by looking at the answer choices relative to each other, rather than trying to apply rules to the individual choices.

if you see "after Katharine Graham became" against "after Katharine Graham's becoming", then the first of these two is definitely more concise, more direct, and just better. the second isn't necessarily wrong, but it's clearly inferior to the first.

Ron , as per your link here "OBJECTS OF PREPOSITIONS are very rarely the antecedents of pronouns"
which is exactly why i eliminated A .
why does this not apply here ?
"it" clearly refers to the object of preposition "publisher of The Washington Post "

well, notice that i wrote "very rarely" -- not "never".

in general, it's not worth thinking about pronoun ambiguity; you should be able to think about just three things with regard to pronouns:

1/
does the pronoun stand for a NOUN? (if not, then go to step 3.)

2/
does the pronoun MATCH the noun in terms of SINGULAR/PLURAL? (if so, it's fine in 99% of cases; if not, it's incorrect.)

3/
is the pronoun one of these exceptions?
post49622.html#p49622

note that this approach would not have led you astray on this particular problem.

Though I will never choose E. I want to understand why E is wrong:

1. what is problem with "after Katharine Grahame's becoming"
yes, I never choose the phrase but what is the problem with it.

2. what is difference between: DOING + COMMA+ MAIN CLAUSE and MAIN CLAUSE +COMMA+ DOING.

in both above cases, doing dose not show an action happening while the main action happens. a quesiton arises

what is difference between

while I am learning Engish, I heard his voice

and

learning English, I heard his voice

The fist sentence "am learning" show an action which is happening while the main action happens.

"learning English" in the second sentence show an action in the same time frame with the main clause but is not happening when the main action happen.

I do not understand the difference among 3 structures above.
Ron, Stacey, pls, help.

first, i think Stacey already addressed problems with E. please read the thread. as for your second question, i think i have made it clear in other threads that your abstract constructions need to have clear examples attached to them so we can understand what you're asking. in your two specific examples, the difference is that the first one is wrong because of verb tense disagreement. i think your second one is okay because "learning" is no longer a verb..

_________________
Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor