ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by subordinate conjunctions. They're a lot

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easier to get along with than the insubordinate ones.

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How should you change the highlighted portion below, if at all?

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By paying too much attention to polls can make a political leader unwilling to propose

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innovative policies.

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The answer choices give us different options for the first word of the sentence, which

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is a big clue that this is a sentence fragment.

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"By" is a subordinating conjunction, which is a word used to connect subordinate clauses

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to the main clause in a complex sentence.

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We know a subordinate clause when we see one because it's generally less important than

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the main clause on which it's totally dependent.

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Of course, in this case, there's no other clause for this one to connect with.

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Wow, that's kind of a sad thought, huh?

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It's like E-Harmony writing back and saying there's literally nobody in the world for

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you.

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Anyway, because there's no other clause here, "by" turns our sentence into a fragment. Therefore

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we can go ahead and take choice (A) out of the running.

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Choices (B) and (C) are now easy to eliminate because "while" and "through" are both subordinating

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conjunctions as well.

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Just like their buddy, "by," they turn our sentence into a fragment, which we're sure

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it doesn't appreciate.

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Choice (D) is correct, because it's the only choice with no troublemaking subordinating

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conjunctions.

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We guess even the most subordinate of conjunctions can be insubordinate sometimes...

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