What would lessen a teacher’s credibility?
Post your answer in the LEAVE A COMMENT section below. I’m not the boss of you, though. Don’t write anything for all I care! I was taught never to threaten people, but as God is my witness, if you don’t comment …
. . .here are my thoughts.
What would lessen a teacher’s credibility?
There’s no quicker way for an English teacher to lose credibility than to overuse potentially the most expendable word in the English language: that. I contemplated embedding as many instances of that seamlessly, yet needlessly into this paragraph. Instead, I decided to waste 36 words in this and the previous sentence informing you of an idea I didn’t even use. That is the word which (I could’ve—probably should’ve!—used that instead of which) feels, to me, like the equivalent of those two pointless sentences above. That often finds itself stuck right there in the middle of a sentence, adding absolutely nothing but wordiness. Not unlike how the word absolutely adds nothing to the previous sentence that nothing doesn’t clearly express by its lonesome. It can be argued that that has ingratiated itself with a redundancy unlike any other word in the English lexicon. As in the sentence above, cases exist where “that that” will exit your lips as though stuttering, yet be grammatically correct. If I need to cut a single word to hit my magical—completely arbitrary—quota of 200 words, I don’t hesitate to nix the first superfluous that that appears.