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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 2, Problem 5. Which choice indicates the best place for a semi-colon in the sentence?
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?
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:
Full Transcript
- 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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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 3. Where does the semicolon fit best?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 2. Where should the semi-colon be placed?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 1. How should this sentence be changed so that it is grammatically correct?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 2. How should we properly hyphenate the words in this sentence?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 4. Which choice best formats this list of items?