Doubt in THE SAT GRAMMAR by Erica L. Meltzer

Test Preparation
21

@Tan029

Lisa See, author of the best-selling novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, has always been intrigued by stories that have been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up.

A) NO CHANGE

B ) best-selling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

C) best-selling novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

D) best-selling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,

‘Lisa See’ is uniquely identifying. The phrase after it (‘author of the *best-selling novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan’) is just giving us extra info. Thus we want it to be gramatically eliminable from the sentence, so we put commas around it.

Now, looking at the phrase itself, ‘best-selling novel’ is not uniquely identifying. We need the title of the book to know what novel we are talking about. Therefore ‘Snow Flower and the Secret Fan’ is not eliminable from the phrase and there should not be commas around it. If it were eliminable then the sentence should make sense without it. However, this is clearly not the case. ‘Lisa See, author of the best-selling novel, has always been intrigued by stories that have been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up.’ does not make sense. The phrase ‘author of the best-selling novel’ is awkward and extremely vague.

22

@Tan029 Everyone has given you good explanations, especially the term “uniquely identifying” by @TheSATTeacher.

Perhaps one more example might help. Suppose that you own two dogs, Spot and Rex. Then, note the following sentences:

My dog, Spot, has fleas. [Grammatically incorrect, because you have two dogs, and because of the commas, this sentence implies that you have only one. In other words, the commas indicate that “my dog” is uniquely identifying.]
My dog Spot has fleas. [Grammatically correct, because this sentence is specifying which of your two dogs has fleas.]

Now suppose that you own only one dog, named Spot. Then, note that exact same sentences have different assignments for correctness:

My dog, Spot, has fleas. [Grammatically correct. This sentence implies that you own one dog, which is the case.]
My dog Spot has fleas. [Grammatically incorrect. This sentence implies that you have multiple dogs and that you are specifying which dog has fleas.]

Note that in one case, the commas are correct and in the other case, they are incorrect. In other words, the correctness cannot be determined solely from syntax. It requires knowledge about how many dogs you own. Or to put it another way, if we assume that you are using correct grammar, see how the two sentences below tell us how many dogs you have:

My dog, Spot, has fleas. [Inference: you have one dog.]
My dog Spot has fleas. [Inference: you have multiple dogs.]

So, it might help to ask yourself this question: How many of the given items are there in the universe? If there is only one, then you need to place commas. Let’s see how this applies to your original question.

, author of the best-selling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, …

How many best-selling novels are there in the universe? Many, so we omit the comma. However, note this slightly different wording:

, author of the best-selling novel of all time, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, …

How many best-selling novels of all time are there in the universe? There can be only one, so we need to place commas here. To use another terminology, in this case, “best-selling novel of all time” is uniquely identifying. (In truth, though, it appears that the best-selling novel of all time is Don Quixote.)

23

One can make a case for an alternative approach to the entire question. The phrase “the best-selling novel” functions as a compound modifier, and therefore must be followed by an object (in this case, the title of the novel) without an intervening comma. The remaining structure of the sentence then follows from this requirement.

24

“Also, you can ignore that a book title has been included. It’s not, by itself, relevant to the sentence structure.”

While the book title may not be relevant to the structure of the sentence, the proper presentation of the title may be thoroughly germane to the purposes of SAT prep. The title should be italicized. In the absence of italics, the commas are, as mentioned previously, more important. Are there Italics in the original source—the SAT prep book? Does the item ask specifically about sentence structure, or might orhography also come into play?

25

Yes @Lynnski, the book title is in italics.

26

@mdphd92, @merc81, @TheSATTeacher, @Lynnski Thanks a lot. My confusion has cleared up. Thanks again.

27

So interesting. The grammatical details were thoroughly explained above, but I think the orthography was also a key to understanding. Most important, however, is that prep materials are only as good as the explanations that are included. It really shouldn’t take this many people trying this hard to make sense of one test item!

28

Restrictive vs. Unrestrictive. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is not the ONLY best-selling novel.