ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by true nuts. The Coen Brothers' wacky sequel to True Grit.

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The writer is considering omitting the underlined sentence:

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A true nut, such as the acorn, are indehiscent or do not open at maturity to release its seeds.

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If the writer were to make this deletion, the essay would primarily lose which of the following?

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It's important for us to take a good look at our writing and ask ourselves if there's

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It’s important for us to take a good look at our writing and ask ourselves if there’s

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any material that can be removed. If there's redundant or irrelevant information, it needs

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to be cut because it can obscure the main point.

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However, it's also important to be sure that we don't cut too much from our work.

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If we go edit-crazy, then we run the risk of losing essential thoughts and ideas.

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So we're going to put ourselves in this writer's shoes and assess how the sentence

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fits in with the big picture. (Let's hope those shoes have been deodorized.)

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Choice (A) is a cinch to eliminate because it's flat-out wrong. The sentence doesn't

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give us one clue about the formation of nuts, so cutting it wouldn't remove that information

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from the essay as a whole.

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Freud would tell you that nuts are formed by bad childhoods.

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We may be oversimplifying on that one.

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(B) is an easy elimination as well. Nowhere does the sentence say that nuts grow slowly.

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Anyway, whoever thinks that nuts grow slowly has never heard of the ever-expanding acorn

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of Guadalajara.

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OK, that was an example of a sentence that could be cut from our own writing because

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it was totally untrue. This brings us to choices (C) and (D).

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(D) disses the sentence by calling it irrelevant, but (C) disagrees, saying that if the sentence

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were cut, we'd lose this scintillating explanation of what qualifies as a true nut. We're going

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to side with (C) on this one and dub it the correct answer. The topic of nuts is introduced

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so that the reader understands the difference between nuts and coconuts, especially because

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the word "nut" is part of the fruit's name. This particular sentence identifies what it

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is about a true nut that makes it different from a coconut.

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We guess that means a coconut is a false nut. Can we ever trust one again?

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