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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 3. Where does the semicolon fit best?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 4. Which choice best formats this list of items?
ACT English Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 3. Where should we place the apostrophe to properly indicate possession?
ACT English 2.1 Style 245 Views
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Description:
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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