Dressed as a man and using the

Dressed as a man and using the name Robert Shurtleff, Deborah Sampson, the first woman to draw a soldier's pension, joined the Continental Army in 1782 at the age of 22, was injured three times, and was discharged in 1783 because she had become too ill to serve.

2 Explanations

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saurabh kumar

Hi,

I didn't understand as to why D is incorrect. What do you mean by a participle? Shouldn't D be correct as the sentence is parallel with "joined"?

Dec 22, 2015 • Comment

Cydney Seigerman, Magoosh Tutor

Happy to help :) In D, "injured" is the past participle of the verb "injure." Without an auxiliary verb like be, a past participle is usually an adjective to describe a noun. For example, at the beginning of the sentence "Dressed as a man" the word "dressed" is a past participle used as an adjective to describe Sampson. Likewise, "injured" would be in the form of an adjective. In order to maintain the parallel structure, the verb phrase "was injured" is necessary. This is the case because the verb injure needs a direct object: "Sampson injured" lacks a direct object and is therefore not corrected. Conversely, joined is used correctly, followed by the direct object "the Continental Army." For that reason, injured does not keep the parallelism with joined in D, while "was injured" would.
Hope this clears things up! :)

Dec 30, 2015 • Reply

Srivatsa Pillutla

Hi Cydney,
Your explanation gives an idea as to why D was eliminated.
But for a verb in past tense to be decided whether it is a Verb or a participle we see whether the subject does the action or not..
So can you also give an insight when we need to take a past tense verb as participle or as verb.
Thanks.

Jan 26, 2017 • Reply

Adam

Hi Srivatsa,

The same rule applies for past participles. To check to see whether a past tense verb is being used in verb form or as a modifier in a participial phrase, note whether the sentence would be complete using only that verb. If it is not complete, then it's probably being used as a modifier.

Dressed as a man and using the name Robert Shurtleff, Deborah Sampson, the first woman to draw a soldier's pension, joined the Continental Army in 1782 at the age...

If we look at the first part of the sentence:

Dressed as a man and using the name Robert Shurtleff...

This is not a complete sentence, so we know "dressed" is not a full verb here. But if we look at this part:

Deborah Sampson, the first woman to draw a soldier's pension, joined the Continental Army in 1782.

This is a complete sentence, so we know "joined" is a full verb.

Jan 26, 2017 • Reply

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Mike McGarry, Magoosh Tutor