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Friday, October 30, 2009

Criminal Sentence 297: Examples include this redundancy

From something I'm editing:

"Examples include a, b, and c."

This is redundant. "Example" means an item that represents a group as a whole; "includes" means is part of a larger group. It would be less redundant to say, "Examples are a, b, and c" or "..., including a, b, and c."

Also, when you use the word "include," you don't have to then use "and so on" or "etc." because by definition you are not giving a complete list.

While we're on this subject, the Latin abbreviation "e.g." means "for example."

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