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Consider the following sentence:

Frank will not be honored for dedicating his time to orphans, as Fred will not be honored for devoting his life to the poor.

A better way to phrase this might be:

Frank will not be honored for dedicating his time to orphans, any more than Fred will be honored for devoting his life to the poor.

But what is the wrong with the first? Or is it grammatically correct?

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    It's fine, though it might be better to rewrite as as just as to preclude the reading because.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Dec 14, 2014 at 20:43
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    'As' also has the meaning 'because', which works here (allowing for suitable context). 'Just as' removes the ambiguity.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Dec 14, 2014 at 21:58
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    You can also use much as to suggest parallism.
    – Barmar
    Commented Dec 16, 2014 at 19:55
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    @user87755: The parallelism is not at issue; they are indeed parallel. The problem is that both clauses are ambiguous. The first one could continue "Rather, Frank will be honored for his skills at ping-pong." Or it could continue; "Rather, Frank will not receive any honors at all." Those correspond to two different ways of understanding ("readings") of that clause; and the other clause has the same structure and similar ambiguities. Since they're conjoined and compared, they both have to have the same reading; but that still means it's too complicated to evaluate.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 19:00

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Looking again at your original sentence—

Frank will not be honored for dedicating his time to orphans, as Fred will not be honored for devoting his life to the poor.

I am struck by the oddness of the author's desire to compare the fates of Frank and Fred at all. If the point of the original sentence is to establish causality with regard to Frank's not being honored—specifically, Fred will not be honored for his work, and therefore Frank will not be either—the author could avoid the ambiguity over the intended sense of as by replacing it with because (as Edwin Ashworth and StoneyB point out in comments above):

Frank will not be honored for dedicating his time to orphans, because Fred will not be honored for devoting his life to the poor [and it would be unfair to honor one but not the other].

But if we are supposed to interpret as to mean "in the same way that" (or as StoneyB suggests, to mean "just as"), I can't see what the author of the example has gained by setting up the sentence as a comparison. Its rather like saying "X won't happen in the same way that Y won't happen." I suppose you could say that everything that doesn't happen doesn't happen in the same way, but that's a rather mind-boggling way to put it. Grammatically the construction is fine, by I see no advantage in using that wording when you could say, far more straightforwardly,

Frank will not be honored for dedicating his time to orphans, and Fred will not be honored for devoting his life to the poor.

or perhaps

Although Frank has dedicated his time to orphans and Fred has devoted his life to the poor, neither will be honored.

If the author intends to say something more penetrating—such as that Frank's time dedicated to orphans isn't nearly as impressive as Fred's life devoted to the poor, and that therefore it makes perfect sense that, since Fred isn't going to be honored, Frank shouldn't be either—that idea needs a better vehicle of expression than the original sentence's equating of the two men's lack of honors.

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    It could be a sarcastic reference to the men, indicating how Frank shut down orphanages and Fred lived a life of luxury on his yacht.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Commented Apr 6, 2015 at 11:57
  • Or perhaps Fred an Frank were both orphans and irrationally considered themselves poor, and actually dedicated their entire lives to self-aggrandizement.
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Apr 6, 2015 at 16:47

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