A verb form question with a list tests whether its actions use matching forms. Sort the choices into main verbs, which say what a subject does, and forms that only describe; then find the blank’s subject. Read to the period, setting aside verbs in parts beginning with although or that. Match the list’s verbs: actions joined by and take matching forms and tenses unless a time clue changes them. A form can sound natural alone but break the list.
Hints
- Hint 1
Set aside the opening words about the early drafts. Find the subject of the part containing the blank.
- Hint 2
Look at what and joins. How does that affect the job the blank must do?
- Hint 3
Compare the forms and tenses of the earlier verbs joined to the blank. Check whether the words about the emotional core change the time of that list or belong to a separate description.
Step-by-step
Find the subject, then match the list
Step 1Find the blank’s subject
Set aside Although the poet’s early drafts were dense and disorganized, since those words give background about the drafts. Who does the work in the part containing the blank? her subsequent revisions is the blank’s subject, so the verb form must fit what the revisions do, not what the drafts were like.
- Step 2
Check why another main verb is needed
In sharpened each image, clarified each metaphor, and, the revisions already have two main verbs, verbs that say what the subject does. Does having main verbs already mean the blank should only describe? No, because and makes it the third action in a joined list, whose verbs need matching forms. The form revealing has no helper to make it a main verb, so it breaks the list instead of completing it.
- Step 3
Find the list’s tense
What tense does that list use? The verbs in sharpened each image, clarified each metaphor use the simple past, the plain past form without a helper. The words that had been buried beneath ornamental language describe the core’s earlier state, so had been buried belongs to that description. Nothing shifts the list to the present, which rules out reveal and reveals.
- Step 4
Complete the list with a past main verb
With revealed, and ______ the emotional core names what the revisions did to the core. The revisions do the revealing, so this -ed form is a past main verb, not a describing form. That gives the third item the same form and tense as the verbs it joins. Choice B.