T-4-Q4
Turning away from literary realism to write romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, in 1909 Selma Lagerlof was the novelist who became the first woman and was also the first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A. Turning away from literary realism to write romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, in 1909 Selma Lagerlof was the novelist who became the first woman and was also the first Swedish writer to win
B. She turned away from literary realism and wrote romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, and novelist Selma Lagerlof in 1909 became the first woman as well as the first Swedish writer that won
C. Selma Lagerlof was a novelist who turned away from literary realism to write romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, and in 1909 she became the first woman in addition to the first Swedish writer winning
D. A novelist who turned away from literary realism to write romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, Selma Lagerlof became in 1909 the first woman and also the first Swedish writer to win
E. As a novelist, Selma Lagerlof turned away from literary realism and wrote romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, in 1909becoming the first woman and also the first Swedish write that won
sdgril wrote:
a) misplaced modifier, needs to refer to Selma
perfect.
since it's a subject-less initial modifier, it automatically refers to whatever immediately follows the comma. since selma doesn't immediately follow the comma, this is wrong.
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b) not too sure exactly why this is wrong -- i just marked this off because I did not like how the pronoun 'she' came before the subject, 'selma'.
yeah.
actually, the way the parallelism is written here, "she" doesn't mean selma.
if i say "he wrote the first half, and jim wrote the second half", then the one thing of which you can be absolutely sure is that jim didn't write the first half.
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c) again, not sure if my reasons are legitimate. but, i didnt like 'Selma was a novelist..'; i also felt the use of 'in addition to' is incorrect here. is the use of the modifier, 'winning the nobel prize', correctly used here? in terms of tense?
interesting.
my reading here is that "in addition to" breaks up the construction completely, into 2 independent parts. therefore, selma was "the first woman" (in the garden of eden!) in addition to blah blah blah.
i don't like "was a novelist" either; it seems to imply that selma stopped being a novelist at some point, becoming something else.
"winning" is incorrect here; it should be "to win". i would classify that as pure idiomatic usage.
very good!
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d) correct
yes.
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e) the use of 'as a novelist' and the placement of the second modifier, 'in 1909...' both seem odd and therefore incorrect.
"as a novelist" implies that you're going to talk about selma in some other capacity later ("as a novelist, she did X; as a woman, she did Y"). so we don't want that.
yeah, "in 1909" is in the wrong place. i'd place it after "becoming" if i had to throw it somewhere in that modifier.
the worst thing about this choice, though, is "that". you cannot EVER use "that" to refer to people, even though we do so all the time in spoken english.
"X and Y" is normally used to indicate two different things. (if you said "the first woman and the first Swedish writer", without the "also", that would normally imply 2 different people)
"X and also Y" is normally used to bestow two descriptions on the SAME person or thing (notice that both of these descriptions are meant to describe Selma Lagerlof).
