I came across a question on the Writing and Language Section on one of the official SAT grammar tests. The sentence was: “Burland ADVOCATED USING soil extraction: removing small amounts of soil from under the tower’s north side…” The capitalized phrase “advocated using” was underlined. And given the four answer choices, I was able to eliminate two of them to “advocated to use” or “advocated using (no change”). The correct answer was no change/'advocated using" instead of “advocated to use”. Can somebody explain this? This is question #21 and I’ll provide a link to the test: https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-practice-test-6.pdf
Burland advocated “doing” something, which was “using.” Burland didn’t advocate “to do” something, because he wasn’t advocating somethingq that was to be done at some point in the future. The verb “using” is the correct form. The advocating was done in the past, hence advocated. “To use”, rather than “using” would indicate that what Burland advocted never occurred but was only advocated, plus isn’t grammatically correct. The other grammatically correct answer choice might have been “the using of” but that is clunky and awkward. The correct answer choice is the most concise one, or “no change”.
In order to use the phrase “to use” the sentence would have to be completely rewritten. It could have possibly said “Burland decided to use a new method to remove small amounts of soil…” But that’s a completely different sentence which may not even be true and does not fit with the style of the paragraph. It also changes the verb tense to future. You have to work with the answer choices available.
The thing here is recognizing that “advocated” is the past tense verb being paired with a present tense verb, “using.” It’s a tricky question because it pulls from the vagaries of English. If the word advocated is being combined with the present form of verb, it’s got to be the -ing form of the verb.
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