Stymieing the Armada’s plans to meet up with

[AnupamaW260]

Stymieing the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders, the reason for the defeat of the Spanish Armada was not only due to gale winds that favored the British but also the sacrificing of eight war ships as “fire ships,” vessels filled with flammable materials and sent downwind toward the closely-anchored Spanish fleet.


A Stymieing the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders, the reason for the defeat of the Spanish Armada was not only due to gale winds that favored the British but also the sacrificing

B The defeat of the Spanish Armada, which stymied the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders, was not only due to gale winds that favored the British but also the sacrifice

C The defeat of the Spanish Armada, which stymied the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders, was not only due to gale winds that favored the British but also the sacrificing

D Stymieing the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders, the reason for the defeat of the Spanish Armada was not only gale winds that favored the British but also the sacrificing

E Stymieing the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders, the defeat of the Spanish Armada was due not only to gale winds that favored the British but also to the sacrifice

Is "sacrificing of" correct?

[Chelsey Cooley]

The structure "the ______ing of _______" is something our SC guide calls a "complex gerund". In general, complex gerunds are allowed, although context also comes into play.

In this case, I suspect that "the sacrificing of" is one of those "technically right but less good than the alternative" situations. Those are interesting, but you don't want to use them (or any rule that you're not pretty sure of) to decide a Sentence Correction problem unless there's absolutely nothing else you can do. In this case, because "the sacrifice of _____" is a common English phrase, you might call "the sacrificing of _________" unidiomatic. But really, I'd pay more attention to the rules you know here, such as parallelism.