Comma as VERBed by

[ZhengJ600]

Hi GMAT instructors,

I have a general question on the usage of "comma as VERBed by". Please see below the sentence (the original sentence is from the 1st question of GMAT Official Advanced Questions, but I have tweaked it a bit in order not to violate the rule of this forum).

Marketing computer games to children, as once prohibited by the government, is now prevalent after the government lifted the ban a few years ago.

Is the sentence above considered grammatically correct in GMAT? How should I interpret the meaning of "as prohibited by the government" here? Does it mean "as (such marketing strategy was) once prohibited by the government"? If so, it may not be grammatically correct because I'm not sure what "as" is doing in this sentence.

I feel that a more GMAT-like sentence would be written like the following (as opposed to using "as prohibited by"):

Marketing computer games to children, a marketing strategy that was once prohibited by the government, is now prevalent after the government lifted the ban a few years ago.

Please let me know of your thoughts. Thank you in advance.

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Interesting example: 295 from the GMAT Advanced . I would encourage you to be logical with your deductions: if you find an answer choice that is incorrect in an official GMAT question, then that answer choice is incorrect. However, understanding exactly why it's incorrect is an important process, and you're right not to fully trust the official explanations, which are often vague and sometimes contradictory.

The modifier that you quote - 'comma + as + verb-ed' - is not one that I've considered. The more common form is 'comma + verb-ed', an adverbial modifier that operates in a similar way to a 'comma + verb-ing' modifier, for example 'Sanjay fell asleep, exhausted after his long day.' Sometimes 'comma, verb-ed' modifiers seem to be used as noun modifiers, for example, 'My car, bought only 2 years ago, broke down.' However, I'd be suspicious of this sentence and would prefer 'My car, which was bought only 2 years ago, broke down.' Check out the modifiers chapter in All The Verbal for more on this.

This leads me to be suspicious of your example, as the word 'which' would make it a clearer noun modifier. Note how one of the answer choices includes a 'which', albeit incorrectly. Note how answer B has a much longer phrase before the modifier, meaning that even if we were to allow the 'as prohibited...' as a noun modifier, it wouldn't be clear what it's modifying: it could be 'developing' or 'marketing'. I'd also be suspicious of the use of "as" in the example you quote. I can't think of any official examples with this kind of construction.

Marketing computer games to children, a [marketing] strategy that was once prohibited by the government, is now prevalent after the government lifted the ban a few years ago.

I agree with you that this sentence feels much more like a GMAT sentence, especially with the absolute phrase modifier. However, there's no need to repeat the word marketing - we already know that the strategy is a marketing strategy.

[ZhengJ600]

Thanks Sage.

You're right that my example may not be perfect, but I'm still trying to understand the correct way of using "comma as VERBed" structure. For example, the sentence below should be correct, but how would you interpret the function of "as" in the sentence below?

Sage is an excellent GMAT instructor, as evidenced by his remarkable forum posts

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

I haven't seen a GMAT problem in which the split 'comma + Verb-ed' and 'comma + as + Verb-ed' is an important one, and I struggle to provide a clear definition to separate them. Although your example sounds fine to me, it also looks like the kind of distraction that GMAT loves to throw in: the student spends time looking at the "as" and then misses something more critical, such as parallelism, or a pronoun. In my experience, GMAT would likely word a correct answer:

Sage is an excellent GMAT instructor, evidenced by his remarkable forum posts.

Nice example, by the way