ACT® · English: Knowledge of Language — Concision and Redundancy
Material Redundant in Terms of the Paragraph or Essay as a Whole (KLA 701)
A sentence can be tight and clear on its own and still be cut, because the essay already told the reader that same thing earlier. Redundancy on this test is measured against the whole passage, not just the sentence.
Most concision questions ask you to shrink one sentence. This one asks you to look outward. A sentence can have zero wasted words and still be the wrong sentence to keep, because some earlier paragraph already delivered the same information. The test isn't checking the sentence against itself anymore. It's checking the sentence against everything the reader has already been told.
The check is simple to describe, harder to remember to run: before judging a sentence on its own merits, scan backward through the essay and ask whether this exact piece of content already appeared. A definition given in paragraph 1 and repeated in paragraph 3 is redundant even if the wording is completely different, because the reader doesn't need the idea twice. This is why you can't answer these questions by reading only the sentence underlined — you have to hold the whole essay in mind, which is what makes this question type feel different from ordinary concision.
The sharpest distinction inside this topic is claim versus instance. If paragraph 1 asserts a general point and a later paragraph gives a specific case of that point, the later sentence is not repetition — it's evidence, and evidence earns its place even when it agrees with something said before. Mixing these up is the main trap: cutting a good example because it 'already said that,' when really it's showing that, with a concrete case. This topic sits right next to redundant wording and redundant modifiers, but it's testing essay-level memory instead of sentence-level cleanup.
Key terms
- Essay-level redundancy
- Repetition judged against the whole passage, where a sentence repeats content delivered earlier rather than repeating itself.
- Claim
- A general statement the essay makes, such as borrowing beats buying for rarely used items.
- Instance
- A specific example that supports a claim without restating the claim itself.
- Backward check
- Scanning earlier paragraphs before judging whether a sentence's content is new information.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a claim already made two paragraphs back turn a clean sentence into repetition?
- How it worksWalk me through checking one sentence against everything an essay has already told the reader.
- Worked exampleFind the redundancy when paragraph one defines a keystone species and paragraph three defines it again.
- Going furtherWhat changes when the repeated idea appears once as a claim and once as an example?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't a definition redundant merely because an alert reader could have guessed it?
Check yourself
End of topic.