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ACT English 2.1 Style 245 Views
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ACT English: Style Drill 2, Problem 1. What's the best way to make this sentence more concise?
Transcript
- 00:03
Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by redundancy. By redundancy. By redundancy...
- 00:09
How would you correct the underlined portion below, if at all?
- 00:11
My older brother, who is a sibling of mine, is studying to become a veterinarian.?
- 00:24
The original sentence seems to be suffering from a serious lack of style.
- 00:28
Because the word "sibling" means someone's brother or sister, we already know that the
Full Transcript
- 00:32
speaker's brother is his or her sibling.
- 00:34
So...choice (A) is guilty
- 00:35
of redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
- 00:37
Choice (B) may be less wordy than (A), but it's equally as redundant.
- 00:41
We don't need to be told that this person's brother is also his or her sibling.
- 00:45
Choice C? This one is guilty of the same redundancy
- 00:48
as both of the other two.
- 00:49
It does give us the added information that the speaker has more than one sibling...
- 00:53
...but that fact doesn't seem particularly relevant to the rest of the sentence.
- 00:56
It turns out that the only way to avoid redundancy is to cut the entire underlined portion out
- 01:00
of the original sentence.
- 01:01
Therefore, (D) is the correct answer.
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