Question

The audience rose up and graciously applauded the guest speaker with a standing ovation what is the best way to revise the sentence to eliminate wordiness?
A. Graciously, the audience rose up and applauded the guest speaker .
B. The audience Rose and graciously gave the guest speaker a standing ovation .
C. Applauding the guest speaker with a standing ovation, the audience rose .
D. The sentence is correct as written .

I think it might be B but I am not sure..thank you!

Answer 1

The answer is the "C. Applauding the guest speaker with a standing ovation, the audience rose" statement which is the best way to revise the sentence to eliminate wordiness. The wordiness is a term used for describing the "too much word" condition in a sentence. One way to eliminate wordiness is to eliminate the filler word in the sentence. "Graciously" is the filler word in the sentence above.

Answer 2

The correct answer is: A. Graciously, the audience rose up and applauded the guest speaker.

The original sentence: "The audience rose up and graciously applauded the guest speaker with a standing ovation" contains redundancies and wordiness, because, if you use the words, "standing ovation", you do not need to additionally say that "...the audience rose up...", since a standing ovation already implies that the audience stood up. Option A, is the best option because it eliminates the aforementioned redundancy, and is also grammatically correct. The remaining options are either grammatically incorrect or have poor syntax.