Is it redundant to repeat a subject when it's been implied in a college essay?
Consider the following:
During my year at UH Manoa, I felt prepared for my computer science courses given my previous experience with programming, but I wasn’t sure how I could apply myself in such a broad discipline. To find an answer, I joined the Association for Computing Machinery at Manoa to engage with people from different fields in computer science.
In regards to the last sentence, is it better to omit "in computer science."?
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3 answers
Leave it in.
I am a former professor. In academics "different fields" is ambiguous, and has been used to indicate entire other fields of study: Like perhaps electrical engineering and circuit design, closely related to "computing machinery", but not "computer science" which is typically a theoretical approach uninvolved in the electronics, studying compilers, algorithms, theoretical architectural ideas (like Tomasulo's Algorithm, caches and virtual memory and minimizing paging or [address] translation lookaside buffer delays). It can get close to the hardware without designing circuits, considering logic gate arrangements and cycle counts (as we must to learn how basic arithmetic is accomplished and sometimes how the instruction decoding pipeline is built, which is constantly being tweaked for on nearly every processor revision or new design).
It is better to qualify "different fields" as specifically computer science fields. It is quite common for researchers to be advised to consider how problems were solved in "different fields", like engineering, biology, chemistry or evolution: In fact, the entire field of AI using "Genetic Algorithms" is inspired by Darwinian Evolution.
Keep your qualifier.
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No, it's better to keep it
Your goal is to present the information as clearly as possible to your reader and that may require to "repeat" the information in this case. Imagine that your reader doesn't really know what "Association for Computing Machinery at Manoa" is or means and that he basically is skipping every name, such as the name of this association. Your reader reads this as "I joined [something] to engage with people from different fields in computer science."
You can see that it's important to keep the last piece of information. Otherwise your reader might ask himself "What different fields? Are we talking about different fields in a science-related sense or are we talking about physical fields?" My teachers were always picky like this. Yours may not be as picky, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
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Redundancy in prose is often useful because people forget things and because the real world relationships implied by the grammatical relationships is not always clear.
One often finds that overzealous editing for brevity can do a hatchet job on clarity. Technically the meaning may have been preserved, but it becomes something of a grammatical exercise to puzzle it out. Better, sometimes, to leave the redundancy in rather than forcing the reader to go back and hunt down antecedents.
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