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While solving this SAT question, I didn't understand why the answer is c. Would anyone elaborate on this please?

In a psychological experiment investigating the halo effect, two groups of college students watched a videotaped interview of a teacher and evaluated his appearance. The tone of the interview _____ one video showed the teacher acting cordial, the other hostile. Unsurprisingly, the group that was shown the video where the teacher was cordial rated his appearance more favorably.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

A) varied while
B) varied: while (wrong)
C) varied: (right)
D) varied,

(screenshot)

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    If you include the "while" as in B) you'd need to rewrite the second part of the sentence (from "the other hostile" to "the other (video) showed the teacher acting hostile"), Though I'm not sure how to explain that grammatically...
    – Showsni
    Aug 23 at 9:57
  • Thanks for your detailed explanation. I really appreciate it.
    – Jpes
    Aug 23 at 10:15
  • Take My car is fast, your car is slow, which can be reduced to My car is fast, yours is slow. We can further reduce that by deleting the predictably repeated verb in the second clause: My car is fast, yours slow (I'm not really interested in whether the two clauses are separated by a comma, semicolon, or colon). But if we include conjunction while before the second clause, we can't delete that second occurrence of the verb.
    – FumbleFingers
    Aug 23 at 10:41
  • 1
    For future questions, an image isn't searchable, nor is it convenient for those responding. Better to take the time to type out the question. Then someone could cut the text and paste it into an answer.
    – TimR on some device
    Aug 23 at 11:19
  • @Showsni: I'd usually explain it using the term, "parallel construction." Basically, you want both phrases to have the same grammatical form.
    – Brian
    Aug 28 at 17:43

1 Answer 1

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Consider the sentences:

  1. The tone of the interview varied while one video showed the teacher acting cordial, the other hostile.
  1. The tone of the interview varied: while one video showed the teacher acting cordial, the other hostile.

In 1, "while" means "at the same time" or "simultaneously", and the while-clause modifies the verb "varied". "The tone of the interview varied while one video showed the teacher acting cordial" would be fine, expressing two things happening at the same time. But the full sentence is problematic because what does "the other hostile" do at the end? It is an ungrammatical fragment.

In 2 "while" is used to contrast two things: the teacher acting cordial (nice), and acting hostile. Here things are not happening at the same time: "while one video showed the teacher acting cordial, the other hostile" is a new main clause and could be a standalone sentence. Hence, because it's a separate main clause, it needs to be separated by punctuation or a conjunction.

Note that it's actually a bit unusual to use this amount of elision (omitting repeated words), which might be confusing. "While one video showed the teacher acting cordial, the other showed them hostile" or "while one video showed the teacher acting cordial, the other showed them acting hostile" would be more common and reveals the actual structure. But in formal writing, it's possible to use parallelism to remove more words.

Compare senses 1 and 2 of while as a conjunction in Merriam-Webster.

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  • The question was about why B is incorrect, not why A is incorrect.
    – gotube ♦
    Sep 8 at 6:51

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