PLease help me on this question please.

Question

Which sentence is written correctly?

A. My mom said that she fell in love with my dad because he always told her she was important to him, spent all of his time after school with her, and she could count on him calling when he said he was going to call.

B. My mom said that she fell in love with my dad because he always told her she was important to him, spent all of his time after school with her, and she could count on him calling when he said he was going to call.

C. My mom said that she fell in love with my dad because he always told her she was important to him, spent all of his time after school with her, and called when he said he was going to call.

D. My mom said that she fell in love with my dad because he always told her she was important to him, spent all of his time after school with her, and called when he said he was going to call.

Answer 1

Hello Nathan,

First of all, it should be duly noted that sentences A and B are the same as one another, and sentences C and D are the same as one another. Therefore, we can eliminate sentences A and D right off the bat since they are duplicates of sentences B and C.

So between sentences B and C: the correct one is sentence C because "called when he said he was going to call" describes something that the subject's dad did in accordance with the previous two actions taken by the dad (grammatically speaking) that caused the subject's mom to fall in love with him.

Whereas "and she could could count on him calling when he said he was going to call" as written in sentence B shifts the focus from the dad back to the mom in terms of the mom becoming the subjective focus of the sentence instead of the dad, in contrast to the previous two actions written in the sentence ("he always told her she was important to him, spent all of his time after school with her,") having been performed by the dad instead of the mom accordingly.

Answer 2

Hi Nathan!

I noticed that you have two repeated answers, which makes life a little easier! :)

We can just focus on A and C, and C would be the answer to this question. It's a bit tricky to spot the reason, because sentence A can be understood. However, question C is correct because it maintains consistency in the dad's qualities/things that he did for the mom. Question A switches back to the subject (the mom), and you can tell that it isn't written correctly by testing the list of qualities in the dad, and noticing that they don't all make sense on their own:

1. My dad always told her that she was important to him
2. My dad spent all his time after school with her
3. My dad she could count on him calling when he said he was going to call.

This third sentence is the problem - it wouldn't actually make sense once you pulled apart the list of qualities.

If you do this test with option C, they all make sense.

Good luck writing!