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Redundant Meanings

Transcript

This lesson is all about redundancy. So, I hate to be redundant, but this lesson is all about redundancy. See what I did there? I repeated myself, and when something is redundant, that is exactly what it means, something is repetitive. And this is one of those errors that can be kind of sneaky on the task, because if you don't know to be looking out for it, you may not even notice it.

So, let's take a look at a few examples. Annually, she has been donating to the charity each year. What's wrong with this sentence? The subject-verb looks fine, the preposition usage here looks fine, the errors of the sentence is expressing the idea annually twice. It says annually, and it says each year.

So, we could either get rid of each year and just say annually, she's been donating to the charity. Or we could say, she has been donating to the charity each year, but we don't need both. So, this sentence, as it's written, is redundant. Here's another example.

A buffalo penny, while a hot commodity amongst coin collectors, is worth little in value. Now, this one is a little more subtle. If we say the penny is worth little, well, then we don't actually have to say in value, because it's already implied since we're talking about a currency and what it's worth.

So here, we could just say, is worth little and get rid of in value. And don't forget that the test always likes for you to be as concise as possible as well to. So, if we can express the same idea with fewer words, we always wanna do that, but we always wanna be watching out particularly, for anything that is redundant.

And finally, let's look at another example here. Although she did her best on game day, but the team was not able to win. This last one's a little bit more of a strange case. It's a little stranger, but it's worth taking a look at. So, here we have a redundancy in the conjunctions. We have although and we have but.

So, this is not the same thing as being redundant, and expressing ideas. But, it is a sentence that we need to fix. Because the idea here is that she did her best on game day, but the team was not able to win. So, we can either say, although she did her best on game day, the team was not able to win.

Or, she did her best on game day, but the team was not able to win. But again, we don't need both. We only need one of them. All right. So, lets take a look at a real test example. So, here's our sentence.

Instead, organic architecture is a reinterpretation of nature's principles and guidelines as they have been filtered through the intelligent minds of men and women. Okay. So, we can see in our answer choices here, that we have principles and we have principles and guidelines.

And we have just principles. We have a couple different spellings of principles, so it's worth reviewing something else here. Principal with a P-A-L is your pal. It's the head of the school, so a principal with that spelling means first, and with principle means, with an le, means a rule or a guideline.

So, aha, here we have the redundancy. So, in this case, we can eliminate b and d, because we have the wrong spelling of principles. We need to decide whether we need principals and guidelines, well, we don't, we just need principles, so that means our answer would be C. Let's take a look at one more here.

Other companies take a different approach, waiting as long as possible to release their Black Friday ads at the last possible moment. So, here it's not quite as obvious as something that says annually or each year. We have, they're waiting as long as possible and the last possible moment. So, we don't need to say both of those things. And so, that means, our answer would be d, we should just the omit the underlined phrase, just get rid of it.

Now, this is a really important answer choice to be, to be watching out for on the test, the idea of omitting an underlined phrase. Again, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the answer, but it means you really wanna be careful to check to see if there's a reason why it's irrelevant, or redundant, or why it shouldn't be in the sentence. So, always take that as a potential hint, a potential clue that, that might be what we're looking for.

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