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Friday, June 19, 2009

Criminal Sentence 233: Serves You Wrong

From a book I read:

"The thick bed of rotted leaves and soft earth served to muffle her footsteps."

There's nothing grammatically wrong with this sentence, but I feel that you can usually cut out the phrase "serve to" because it is useless. Why not just say, "The thick bed of rotted leaves and soft earth muffled her footsteps" and save two words?

3 comments:

the gourmez said...

You've got either a missing "is" in your post or an "it" that should be an "is."

the gourmez said...

Scratch that, just a missing "is."

The Sentence Sleuth said...

Thanks! Fixed.