ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by convoluted sentences.

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We'd give you an example, but it'd take too long.

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Illustrating the concept of convoluted... See how clever we are?

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[ mumbles ] All right.

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We're just gonna skim. Skim, skim, skim. And... skim.

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Which of the following words is most grammatically parallel to

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"faculty" in line 23? All right, where's line 23?

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Right here. All right, and here are the potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, well, first, we've gotta take another look at

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the incredibly long and convoluted sentence from whence this line comes.

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Did you like how we threw in "whence" in there?

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Just trying to get into the spirit, people.

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Okay, now for the sentence, right here.

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Ugh. Who writes like this?

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All right, uh-huh, that is definitely a wordy jungle.

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Never fear, we brought a machete.

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We're trying to find the answer choice that is the most similar to the word "faculty."

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So let's start by figuring out what's up with that word.

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If we isolate "faculty," we can see that it's a

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noun being modified by the prepositional phrase "of observation."

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Cool. So now we know that we're looking for another noun

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that's in the same boat as "faculty."

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Only one more will fit in this boat, otherwise it'll capsize.

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So we better hurry up. All right, well, let's start by nixing choice B.

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At their most basic, prepositional phrases

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are made up of a preposition, like the word "of"

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and a noun, like "observation,"

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which functions as what we call the object of the preposition.

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Well, in this phrase, "observation"'s

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job is to help the prepositional phrase describe "faculty."

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It's describing something,

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not being described, so it isn't parallel to faculty.

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Basically, we need another noun that's being described by a prepositional phrase.

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What can we say? Some nouns just need more attention than others.

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Since we know we need a noun, A is easy to eliminate.

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"Dormant" is an adjective whose job it is to describe nouns.

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So this one's barely worth our time.

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Options D and E are both nouns, but, like "observation," they're both

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objects of the preposition.

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If you don't believe us, just whittle down the extra words around them. Like that.

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We end up with "power of generalization" and "habit of method."

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See how these nouns are parallel to "observation" and not "faculty"?

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Option C is the one and only answer.

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Like "faculty,"

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"power" is a noun being described by a prepositional phrase.

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In this case, the prepositional phrase "of generalization."

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Side note: the "power of generalization"

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would probably be the worst superpower ever.

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On X-Men, can you imagine?

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Like the guys steps up, "I have the power of generalization."

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[ mumbles ]

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[ rimshot ]

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