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4.3: Weeding "You" Out- Assignment

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    248431
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    Try these tips in the following sentences. Rewrite so that the utterance is in the third person.

    1. When bills arrive, you wonder how you are going to pay for them.
    2. The dialogue helps us to understand the plot.
    3. Are you wondering what kind of job you will seek after college?
    4. You should really fix these potholes.
    5. If you want to write well, you must get rid of “you” in formal papers!
    6. In this paper, I will tell you why I think that gentrification does not address but rather provokes the problems it supposedly solves.
    7. You should not allow smoking in apartment buildings, either.
    8. You should not allow a smoker near your newborn child.
    9. As you know, college isn't easy.
    10. After reading this, you should agree with me that American foreign policy is a threat to world peace.
    11. You might consider a particularly odious departure to be lumped in amongst this group.

    Now, take these practices into your work. Look at your latest writing draft—maybe even go back to earlier work—and do a word search for ‘you’. Find alternatives for each example until you have eliminated all the second-person mentions from your writing. 

    Now you are an expert in eliminating second-person pronouns!


    4.3: Weeding "You" Out- Assignment is shared under a CC BY-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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