If the sentence said: “Sarah was a (more gifted novelist than both) her sisters,” why would you replace the ( ) part with “a more gifted novelist than either” rather than “the most gifted novelist of both”?
Is this multiple choice? List all the possible answers, please.
This appears to be a meaning issue (which is important on SAT writing). The original is wrong because she is more gifted than either one of her sister not more gifted than the both of them combined. As for the “most gifted” she could only be the most gifted if she is included in the group. She can’t be the most gifted of both sisters. She could however be the most gifted of the 3 sisters since then she is included in the group and the group has more than 2 members.
It’s comparison & noun/# agreement: If she’s “a more gifted novelist” than someone, that “someone” must be singular, because “both her sisters” cannot be “a novelist.” Therefore both sides of the comparison must be singular. It’s a variation on the old CB standby: “Both Bob and Gary wanted to be a fireman when they grew up” (as if they could somehow meld into one giant, misshapen fireman!).
The fix is “than either of her sisters.” She can’t be “the most gifted novelist of both her sisters” because she is not a member of the group “both her sisters” (she isn’t one of her sisters, by definition).
Thanks for your explanations/examples, guys!
(I’ll add that I disagree that “meaning” is “important on SAT writing,” although many people believe it to be true.)
I’m surprised to see you write that Marvin. I feel like I am about to turn this into a semantic debate, the likes of which I think we have had before, but I think a lot of what appears on the writing section has to do with meaning. I am not saying that “meaning” needs to be viewed as a separate error type necessarily but a lot of the errors that you see on the SAT have to do with meaning. And in my opinion reading the sentences with meaning in mind can help you spot those errors, especially on the harder questions.
Just to rattle off a few examples, comparison questions are almost always about whether the comparison is a logical comparison on a meaning level. Redundancy errors happen because the meaning of the redundant part was already implied elsewhere. Diction errors are straight up meaning errors. In fact I view question 29 on the long writing sections as a “meaning” question because so often the answer deals with one of the 3 issues above or some other meaning related thing (though of course not always).
And even the example above and in your explanation. The reason that you can’t say the most gifted novelist of her sisters is that it doesn’t make sense, right? in order to understand how that could be written correctly you need to understand why, on a meaning level, it doesn’t make sense…as you and I wrote, she would need to be a member of that group in order to be the most gifted of the group. To me that is pretty much a meaning issue.
I think this is important because in my experience and in my opinion focusing on meaning is an important way for people to be able to spot many of the errors on the SAT writing.
Yeah, I used to think “changes the meaning” was a valid reason to discount an answer choice, but I’ve come to believe that those “errors” can be attributed more easily (esp. for students’ understanding) to grammatical/mechanical/usage errors, like the noun/number disagreement above.
And actually, I should be clearer. I agree with you that “meaning” plays a role in many error types (such as redundancy). I’m opposing the commonly held notion that an answer may be wrong because it “changes the meaning.”
Ah, ok, I got it. Yeah I didn’t understand that that was what you meant. So agreed, “changes the meaning from the original” is definitely not a reason that an answer would be wrong. The way I like to put it is that the “original” is arbitrary because one can imagine that they take the “original” sentence, write 4 incorrect versions, and then just scramble them so that the “original” only ends up as answer choice A roughly 80% of the time.
So usually the original is wrong and occasionally it is wrong because the meaning is wrong. Again in a comparison question usually the original sentence makes an illogical comparison so one needs to change the meaning from the original in order to fix the sentence.
Obviously the question couldn’t ask you to choose from among different but equally acceptable meanings. So in my opinion the meaning errors are either instances of illogical meaning (for example, comparison or diction errors) or lack of clarity/ambiguity errors where the meaning is totally unclear or could be interpreted in multiple ways (which of course would be wrong). And maybe I would through in the added case of redundancy where it is an issue of repeating meaning that was already implied or stated.
But yeah, students seem to make the mistake at some point of believing that an answer choice is wrong because it “changes the meaning” and that is never a reason that an answer will be wrong (or at least I have never seen it).