5 exercises — avoiding repetition with ellipsis and pro-verb substitution in technical conversations and docs.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Two developers are reviewing options. Dev A: "Should we use PostgreSQL or MySQL?" Dev B: "I prefer PostgreSQL, but either _____ work." Which word completes the substitution correctly?
"Either would do" uses substitution — "do" replaces the verb phrase "work" from the previous sentence, avoiding direct repetition. This is natural in spoken and written English: "Either would work" → "Either would do." In British English, "do" is a common pro-verb (a verb that substitutes for another verb phrase). Compare: "Can we refactor this?" / "We could do." Ellipsis (omitting words) and substitution (replacing words with "do", "so", "one") keep technical conversations concise without being ambiguous. Option B is also grammatically valid ("either would work") but uses direct repetition, not substitution.
2 / 5
A design doc says: "The auth module was rewritten in Go. The payment module was _____ in Go." Which ellipsis makes this most concise without losing clarity?
"also rewritten" uses ellipsis — the understood element "in Go" is omitted because it was just established. The result is: "The payment module was also rewritten [in Go]." The omitted part is recoverable from context, which is the key condition for ellipsis. "Too" alone (option C) would require the whole predicate to be implied ("was also rewritten in Go, too") and is stylistically weak. "Also rewritten in Go" (option A) is repetitive — exactly what ellipsis avoids. Ellipsis is especially effective in technical lists and comparisons where the same condition applies repeatedly.
3 / 5
A colleague asks: "Have you reviewed the API spec?" You have. Which response uses ellipsis most naturally?
"Yes, I have." is the classic example of auxiliary ellipsis. The main verb "reviewed the API spec" is omitted because the listener can recover it from the question. This is the standard pattern in English question-response pairs: "Have you deployed it?" / "I have." — "Did you push the fix?" / "I did." — "Can you take the on-call shift?" / "I can." Option D ("I did so") uses substitution ("so" = "reviewed the API spec") — also grammatically correct but slightly more formal. Option A and B are full repetitions — grammatically fine but stylistically heavy in conversation.
4 / 5
In a sprint retrospective note: "The CI pipeline failed twice in sprint 22, and it _____ in sprint 23 as well." Which substitution avoids repeating "failed twice"?
"did so" is the correct pro-verb substitution. "So" here substitutes for the verb phrase "fail twice" — "it did so" = "it failed twice." This is formal and precise: "The server crashed at 3am and did so again at 6am", "The tests passed locally and did so in CI too." "Did it" (option B) would mean something different — "it" would refer to a specific object, not the predicate. "Was so" is not idiomatic. "Did so" is particularly useful in technical writing (reports, post-mortems) where you need to reference a previously described event without full repetition.
5 / 5
An engineer writes: "We need to update the staging config and the production config." Which version uses ellipsis to reduce the repetition?
"the staging and production configs" uses noun-phrase ellipsis — "config" appears once as a plural instead of being repeated. The singular "config" from each phrase is merged into one shared plural. This is the most common form of ellipsis in technical writing: "the read and write replicas", "the development and production environments", "the frontend and backend services." Option B is a full repetition of the entire clause. Option C uses "both of the configs" which loses the specific staging/production distinction. Option D adds "also" without removing the repetition. Noun-phrase ellipsis creates tighter, more readable technical prose.