A verb form question with added descriptions tests whether you can find the main subject’s own verb. Find the subject, cross out extra information, and read through the whole sentence. Then count the main verbs belonging to that subject, rather than to words inside descriptions. An -ing form can’t be a main verb alone, and every clause needs a subject and its own main verb. Wrong choices can contain verbs yet leave the main sentence unfinished.
Hints
- Hint 1
Look at the second sentence and find its subject. The commas around the detail beginning with first can help you separate that subject from extra information.
- Hint 2
Check the subject of each verb, including makes after the semicolon. Which verbs, if any, belong to the practice?
- Hint 3
Read the main sentence with its extra details removed. Does it have its own verb before the semicolon, or does it still need one?
Step-by-step
Find the practice’s own verb
Step 1Set aside the writing detail
Venn’s practice of writing each episode twice is the subject, or what this sentence is about. What tells us what the practice does? Let’s set aside first as she remembered it and then as her grandmother described it, a detail about the writing. Remembered and described belong to that detail, so the practice still needs its own main verb.
- Step 2
Check the other nearby verbs
The shared phrase a technique she calls “countermemory” renames the practice. Can calls be the missing verb? No, its subject is she, not the practice. The later it makes those contradictions part of the memoir’s design has its own subject and verb after the semicolon, so makes can’t serve as the practice’s verb either.
- Step 3
Test the added clauses
What do that does and which does do to the sentence? That and which each start a clause, a subject with its verb, that describes the technique. In the version with that does, the verb belongs to that; in the version with which does, it belongs to which. Those added clauses leave Venn’s practice without a main verb of its own.
- Step 4
Add the main verb
Which remaining form can be the main verb? Doing is an -ing form without a helper, so it only describes. The version ending in “countermemory,” does closes the renaming phrase with a comma and adds the practice’s main verb: does not eliminate contradictions between the accounts. Choice C.