Sunday, January 13, 2008

Variety

It's been a whirlwind of a week with all sorts of errands to run and people to see. As usual, real life got in the way of blogging. Also, I'm kinda running out of ideas so if you have anything you want me to blog about, please let me know.

I saw this sign at a digital printing shop yesterday: "choose from a different variety of ways to print your pictures." Although I commend the attempt to use good English, I noticed the redundancy immediately. The words "different" and "variety" have very similar meanings. Both, after all, mean "dissimilar." So, if you say "a different variety," you're saying the same thing twice.
It's an instance of sentence clutter--words that only lengthen the sentence but do not add to the meaning.

Remember, although it's good to have an extensive vocabulary, it's also wise to learn to use the words correctly.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi maam

How about "wide variety of ways to print your pictures"

Anonymous said...

Besides English grammar, I can also learn more language terms which I used not to be sure of their way of expression in Enlgish. Thank you!