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It was a beautiful, sunny day yesterday.

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day.

Are both sentences idiomatic or native speakers don't use the dummy pronoun "It" in the mentioned context, but use "Yesterday was..."? If both sentences sound good, is there a difference in the meaning?

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Both are correct and quite natural, and have the same meaning of describing and giving an opinion about the previous day's weather.

If you're looking to split hairs over tiny differences though, there are pragmatic differences between the two structures.

The "It was a..." has the feel of a written narrative, like it's introducing the context for a story that's not necessarily about the day itself, but something that happened to occur on that day.

Here's some examples:

It was a beautiful day yesterday, so I went for a walk and bumped into one of my friends from grade school.
It was our 10th wedding anniversary yesterday, and we had a reservation, but our babysitter cancelled at the last minute.
It was a particularly rough day for the IT department yesterday, so after work a bunch of us went to a bar and vented.

The "Yesterday..." structure works just as well in those examples, but feels more like a casual anecdote, and less like a narrative.

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  • If I understand you right, You would use the second version in your phrase of one-two sentences or in a dialogue. But in written English or in a long spoken story is prefferable the first version. Right?
    – Sergei
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 19:30
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    What is an anecdote if it isn't a 'narrated story'? I was about to upvote your answer until I got to that point. Had you said "The'yesterday structure' seems more suited to casual conversation" I would have agreed with you throughout.
    – WS2
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 19:36
  • @WS2 It seems we don't share the terminology for what we're talking about, but from your comment, I'm sure we're talking about the same thing. By "narration" I mean the prosaic structure of a narrated story, in contrast to the way we talk in casual conversation. Anecdotes are usually told as casual conversation with normal conversational language and structures, but we use different language and structures when telling a story as a narration. I've edited the last paragraph to clarify
    – gotube ♦
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 19:45
  • @Sergei You've got the distinction correct, but I would say it weaker: I'd be more likely to use the second structure in a dialogue, while the first structure works well in formal storytelling, like written English or a long spoken story. Like I said in my answer, it's a small, small difference, but if you're into those details like I am, it's worth knowing.
    – gotube ♦
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 19:56
  • @gotube Ok, that's good. But I would be careful about using the word "prosaic" to mean simply "written as prose (rather than poetry)". That original use of the term is now confirmed by the OED as "rare". More often "prosaic" nowadays has the sense of "dull and commonplace".
    – WS2
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 20:33
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Both are correct, idiomatic and equivalent in meaning. "It" used as a dummy subject of a sentence is quite common in spoken American English and I would not shy away from it. Having said that, my opinion is that the second variant is more concise.

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