While drafting her memoir The Rooms We Borrow, essayist Mara Venn compared her childhood recollections with cassette interviews that her grandmother had recorded decades earlier. Venn’s practice of writing each episode twice, first as she remembered it and then as her grandmother described it, ______ not eliminate contradictions between the accounts; instead, it makes those contradictions part of the memoir’s design.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
For sentences with several modifiers between a subject and its verb, first strip away the interrupting phrases to identify the core clause. Then check that any nonessential appositive is enclosed by commas and that the subject has a finite main verb, not merely a verb inside a “that” or “which” clause or an -ing participle.
Hints
Find the sentence's core
Temporarily remove the descriptive phrases between the subject and the blank. What noun needs a main verb?
Classify the inserted phrase
The phrase beginning with “a technique” renames an earlier noun rather than advancing the main clause.
Check for a complete clause
Determine whether each option supplies a finite main verb or merely adds a dependent or participial modifier.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify the main subject
The core subject is “Venn’s practice.” The phrases describing how Venn writes each episode interrupt the main sentence but do not change its structure.
Set off the appositive
The noun phrase “a technique she calls ‘countermemory’” renames “practice,” so it functions as a nonessential appositive and must be followed by a comma.
Complete the main clause
The sentence still needs a finite predicate for the singular subject “practice.” The verb “does” supplies that predicate, producing the complete clause “Venn’s practice ... does not eliminate contradictions.”