Bessie Coleman

Today’s ACT question of the day is an English question from the passage we saw just over a week ago about Bessie Coleman.  Today we are looking at underlined portion 5 to see how best to revise it.

Portion 5 comes between a sentence about when she was born and where she would end up and a sentence about life in Oklahoma.  The underlined sentence gives us information about how long ago 1893 was, and there’s nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence as it’s written. 

But redundancy and wordiness are part of the English test, too!  Do we need this sentence – does it provide useful information in context?

Nope.  We already know that she was born in 1893, and we can deduce for ourselves that 1893 was about 120 years ago.  (Time flies…and so did Bessie Coleman!)  This sentence clutters the paragraph with unnecessary information, so the best answer is to OMIT it.

Remember this idea when you are writing your essay, too – state each fact only once, and don’t include facts that aren’t useful to your argument.