pick a sentence..

Re: pick a sentence..
Hi navigator,


This depends on what meaning you want for the sentence. Using female is trying to say more clearly that the atmosphere is not masculine. If you use feminine then you are either 1) trying to say that the atmosphere has female qualities (umm, I don't know, caring? understanding? etc.) or 2) trying to, with fairly bad grammar, trying to say that the word atmosphere is a feminine noun (as used in foreign languages).


I personally would go with knelt down because it's more descriptive than knelt. Genuflect is most commonly used in instances where the kneeler is kneeling in worship, even though technically it could work in the sentence. The difference between kneel and kneel down is minimal and choosing one over I would say is purely subjective.


Here I would rule out tenor only because it's not that common (I've never used it hehe) and would choose between meaning and significance by deciding how important is the meaning? I see meaning as just basic meaning, if that makes any sense. But when I say something has significance, I'm trying to say that its "meaning" probably affects someone or something.


Here, I don't think there's a hyphen between overly and tidy, just because overly is just an adverb modifying the adjective tidy. To me, over-tidy sounds a little sloppy, so it's not as impactful in speech in my opinion. The other too are basically the same, but I would go with overly tidy because it sounds more ... impactful, I guess, more impressive.


Since (lady's) private room is basically just the definition of boudoir, I couldn't decide on that alone (and one could argue that a lady's boudoir is redundant). I would instead decide if I felt the audience to whom I was speaking would be familiar with the word (adults vs. middle schoolers, men vs. women for example).

Hope this helps!

Gee, Silversturm, I agree with almost every comment you made, but I don't think "impactful" is a word.

Sorry if I'm a crab today.

Hehe, I was wondering that too, as it would be anticlimactical in a grammar post. I checked www.m-w.com for "impactful" and it said that it was at least in their "unabridged" (aka $$$) version, so I figured that was good enough anyway.

Thanks silversturm, that's really of a help.So, female means that it's definately not a masculine, but a feminine means it has qualities of female touch.

does this mean that it's only a nuance between knelt and knelt down?

Thanks

Yes.


That's a good way of saying it. I guess some other examples would be:

He looked at the clock.
He looked over at the clock.

She jumped on the wagon.
She jumped up on the wagon

You can see how the prepositions added to these sentences do very little to add to the overall meaning. Like, isn't it assumed, a least a little, that 'He' had to turn his head/body to look at the clock. Same with up. The act of jumping implies going upwards, a least in some sense. However, each preposition, including down, adds a very small change in the feeling of the sentence - makes the action of the sentence more descriptive in my opinion, gives it some more uuumph.