<p>If you were to revise the sentence for the SAT
"Marvin is studying public relations and plans to make it a career"</p>
<p>would you say
1. Marvin is studying public relations and is planning to make it a career</p>
<p>or </p>
<p>2.Marvin is studying public relations and planning to make it a career</p>
<p>Which is more correct?</p>
<p>"Marvin is studying public relations and plans to make it a career"</p>
<p>The correct answer is
"2.Marvin is studying public relations and planning to make it a career"</p>
<p>'is' is already implied in the second dependent clause.
And, the second dependent clause is also related to the first dep clause.</p>
<p>public relations is the career.</p>
<p>A slightly different take:</p>
<p>This is a very odd SAT question, because the original is not a good test of a faulty parallel construction. </p>
<p>The "correction" changes the meaning subtly by changing the tense from present ["he plans": suggesting a definite, formulated plan] to present progressive ["he is planning": suggesting an ongoing process of planning].</p>
<p>You can see that there's no real grammatical fault in the original by substituting other verbs in the same tenses:</p>
<p>Martin is reading a book and decides to propose to Mary.
is not the same as
Maritin is reading a book and is deciding [whether or not] to propose to Mary.</p>
<p>bump, I need more opinions on this!</p>
<p>They are both correct. similar structure are required, but the first item in the list is allowed to have a verb or preposition in the beginning:</p>
<p>subject verb item1, item2, and item3
is correct
subject verb item1, verb in the same tense item2, and verb in the same tense item3
is also correct hope this helps</p>