5 exercises — practise softened contradiction with "if anything".
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "if anything" to suggest a metric moved in the opposite direction from what was expected?
"The refactor didn't reduce latency; if anything, it made the p99 slightly worse" correctly places "if anything" as a parenthetical set off by a comma, directly before the clause it qualifies. Option B misplaces the comma inside the clause. Option C reverses the word order of the fixed phrase. Option D inserts an extra, ungrammatical "that" after the phrase.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "if anything" to concede that a claim understates the real situation?
"The outage was serious, and if anything, the postmortem understates how close we came to data loss" is correct, with subject-verb agreement ("the postmortem understates") intact. Option B has a subject-verb agreement error ("understate" instead of "understates"). Option C incorrectly uses a gerund instead of a finite verb. Option D inserts an ungrammatical "that" that does not belong after "if anything".
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "if anything" at the start of a sentence, followed by a comma, to introduce a strengthened restatement?
"If anything, the new onboarding flow is more confusing than the one it replaced" correctly opens with "if anything" followed by a comma, then the full main clause. Option B misplaces the comma inside the main clause. Option C reverses the word order of the phrase. Option D adds an ungrammatical "that" before the clause.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "if anything" to soften a comparison in a retrospective, avoiding a flat contradiction?
"Code review didn't slow the team down; if anything, it caught issues that would have taken much longer to fix later" is correct, with the past tense "caught" matching the retrospective context. Option B has a subject-verb agreement and tense error ("it catch"). Option C misplaces the comma between the pronoun and the verb. Option D incorrectly splits "anything" into two words.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "if anything" to concede that an estimate was, if it erred at all, too conservative?
"The original estimate wasn't too optimistic; if anything, it was too conservative given how fast adoption grew" is correct and grammatically clean. Option B misspells "too" as "to". Option C incorrectly inverts "it was" to "was it" without any grammatical reason to do so. Option D tacks on a stray, ungrammatical "being" at the end.