ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by redundancy. By redundancy. By redundancy...

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How would you correct the underlined portion below, if at all?

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My older brother, who is a sibling of mine, is studying to become a veterinarian.?

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The original sentence seems to be suffering from a serious lack of style.

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Because the word "sibling" means someone's brother or sister, we already know that the

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speaker's brother is his or her sibling.

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So...choice (A) is guilty

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of redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

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Choice (B) may be less wordy than (A), but it's equally as redundant.

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We don't need to be told that this person's brother is also his or her sibling.

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Choice C? This one is guilty of the same redundancy

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as both of the other two.

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It does give us the added information that the speaker has more than one sibling...

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...but that fact doesn't seem particularly relevant to the rest of the sentence.

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It turns out that the only way to avoid redundancy is to cut the entire underlined portion out

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of the original sentence.

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Therefore, (D) is the correct answer.

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