Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
Brasilian author and current Swiss resident Paulo Coelho’s ____ long admired by readers across the globe and published in dozens of languages, from English to Turkish to Korean, continue to resonate with generation after generation.
The correct answer is (A).
current priority level - the Path to 650+ and higher
When this question feels routine, you’ll know you’re solidly further down the road.
Q: Why do we want the comma that ends up being in the correct answer?
A: The comma could bracket off another comma already within the sentence to create our friend an appositive.
Q: Which of the two commas is the bracketing comma to go along with the one we are adding in?
A: The comma after “Korean” is the bracketing comma. If we pull the remove move that can be pulled when it comes to appositives, we would be left with “Brasilian author and current Swiss resident Paulo Coelho’s books continue to resonate with generation after generation.”
Q: How do we know that (A) is better than (D) here?
A1: It is possible to sort of just memorize that (A) is better than (D). As we are often doing, we modeled this question off of officially published questions that seem to be following a designed model.
A2: An aspect of a classic appositive is that it describes. In this case, the phrase between the commas is describing Paulo Coelho’s books. A description like this would not start with a verb like “were”.
A3: There is a potentially interesting quirk tied to commas that a comma would be unlikely to come right before a verb.
If you do not find any of the above answers to the final question-in-question to be satisfactory, let us know, and we’ll see what other interesting things we can get up to.