ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by favorite relatives. In other words, the

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kind you're not embarrassed to be friends with on Facebook.

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

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My cousin, who is one of my favorite relatives, just graduated from high school.

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And here are the potential answers:

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As our hunt for redundancy, repeating things, saying the same thing over and over again continues, your eyes are immediately drawn to choices (B)

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and (C). Well, ours are, anyway.

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Both choices clarify the fact that the speaker's cousin is also his or her relative.

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This is redundant because every person's cousin is also his or her relative. In some states,

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a cousin can even be a spouse, though we wouldn't recommend it.

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This shared redundancy allows us to eliminate (B) and (C) in one fell shmoop. Uh, swoop.

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We've now narrowed down our choices to (A) and (D). (D) suggests that we omit the underlined

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portion altogether.

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While this would make the sentence shorter, it would also change the meaning.

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If the speaker said, "My cousin graduated from high school," he or she would leave out

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the fact that the cousin is a fave relative.

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While it's important to keep things concise, it's also important to not trim away the essential

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meaning of a sentence.

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This means that our original sentence is free of redundancy, and we can mark choice (A)

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as the correct answer.

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However, (D) may be the best choice if the narrator doesn't want to insult everybody

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else in his family.

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