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ACT English Videos 162 videos

Where Does the Semicolon Fit Best?
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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 3. Where does the semicolon fit best?

ACT English 3.4 Punctuation
522 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 4. Which choice best formats this list of items?

Place the Semi-Colon!
410 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 5. Which choice indicates the best place for a semi-colon in the sentence?

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ACT English 2.5 Style 236 Views


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Description:

ACT English: Style Drill 2, Problem 5. How would you correct the underlined portion if at all?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by favorite relatives. In other words, the

00:08

kind you're not embarrassed to be friends with on Facebook.

00:15

How would you correct the underlined portion below, if at all?

00:17

My cousin, who is one of my favorite relatives, just graduated from high school.

00:22

And here are the potential answers:

00:24

As our hunt for redundancy, repeating things, saying the same thing over and over again continues, your eyes are immediately drawn to choices (B)

00:32

and (C). Well, ours are, anyway.

00:34

Both choices clarify the fact that the speaker's cousin is also his or her relative.

00:40

This is redundant because every person's cousin is also his or her relative. In some states,

00:45

a cousin can even be a spouse, though we wouldn't recommend it.

00:51

This shared redundancy allows us to eliminate (B) and (C) in one fell shmoop. Uh, swoop.

00:57

We've now narrowed down our choices to (A) and (D). (D) suggests that we omit the underlined

01:01

portion altogether.

01:03

While this would make the sentence shorter, it would also change the meaning.

01:06

If the speaker said, "My cousin graduated from high school," he or she would leave out

01:10

the fact that the cousin is a fave relative.

01:12

While it's important to keep things concise, it's also important to not trim away the essential

01:16

meaning of a sentence.

01:18

This means that our original sentence is free of redundancy, and we can mark choice (A)

01:22

as the correct answer.

01:23

However, (D) may be the best choice if the narrator doesn't want to insult everybody

01:27

else in his family.

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