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ACT English: Passage Drill 2, Problem 11. Which of the following sentences would make the most effective transition?
In this ACT English passage drill determine if the writer of the passage may or may not have achieved their proposed goal.
ACT English: Passage Drill Drill 3, Problem 2. What would the paragraph lose if the writer omits the underlined phrase?
ACT English 4.10 Passage Drill 186 Views
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ACT English: Passage Drill Drill 4, Problem 10. Should the writer change the exclamation mark into a period in the previous sentence?
Transcript
- 00:03
Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the Kitamura FCM-8006W.
- 00:09
Which won the award for most unimaginative name for a fortune cookie machine in 1981 and 1982.
- 00:32
The writer is considering changing the exclamation
- 00:34
mark in the previous sentence to a period. Should the writer make this change?
- 00:38
And here are the potential answers...
Full Transcript
- 00:43
The author is right to be wary of the exclamation mark.
- 00:46
Exclamation marks should only be used if we have something astounding to say;
- 00:53
they should be reserved for when we want to put some extra oomph behind a sentence.
- 00:58
Overuse maxes out the volume on every sentence, making it impossible to emphasize the thing
- 01:03
we really want people to hear.
- 01:05
With that in mind, let’s go through the answer options to see if we can find a reason
- 01:09
to get rid of the exclamation mark in this question.
- 01:12
Option B.
- 01:13
Option (B) isn’t a good reason to nix an exclamation mark; they have nothing to do
- 01:17
with whether a sentence is closely related to the topic at hand.
- 01:20
We want to cut things that are irrelevant, right?
- 01:23
Why would we want to broadcast them to the world?
- 01:25
Choice (A) give us no valid reason to cut the exclamation mark either. It doesn’t
- 01:29
matter if one has been previously used in the passage.
- 01:32
As we said before, exclamation marks do their jobs best when there aren’t many of them.
- 01:37
They’re a tool to help a writer make a particular sentence stand out from the crowd.
- 01:41
We’re gonna say no to choice (D) as well.
- 01:43
The language in the passage is far from academic or dense.
- 01:47
In fact, it’s pretty casual and easy-going.
- 01:50
Anyway, if we were trying to write something super academic, we wouldn’t want to throw
- 01:54
in an exclamation mark simply to lighten things up.
- 01:57
It would feel random, and then people would see through how smart we were trying to sound.
- 02:01
(C) is the right answer because it correctly identifies the tone of the passage and the
- 02:05
role of the sentence within it.
- 02:07
This passage is informal, so it can totally get away with an exclamation mark.
- 02:11
After all, 8,000 cookies is a lot for one machine to make in an hour!
- 02:17
Did you hear that exclamation mark we just used?
- 02:34
Boom.
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