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Is this sentence correct?

It was two years of my life that I enjoyed thoroughly.

Should I change it to:

They were two years of my life that I enjoyed thoroughly.

The preceding sentence goes like this:

The most influential experience in persuading me to take that decision was my career at ABC. It was/They were two years of my life that I enjoyed thoroughly.

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    You haven't given the full (preceding) context, which would tell us more exactly what the pronouns it, they refer to, so it's impossible to answer this question properly. But note that in general it's more idiomatic to use it for referents that are only vaguely (or not at all) "defined". So I lived in London for a few months. It was fun is much more likely than I lived in London for a few months. They were fun. – FumbleFingers Reinstate Monica Nov 27 '20 at 14:17
  • Replace “it” with “That career” to make it explicit what the “it” is referring to and it becomes clear that it is singular. When parsing written work try this trick of expanding all the references and contractions to better understand what is really happening. – jwpfox Nov 28 '20 at 0:24
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The problem is that you're trying to interpret this sentence as putting the same noun on both sides of the copula, and in this particular construction, that's not what is happening. The antecedent of "it" is "career," not "years," and "career" is singular. So you use "it was" rather than "they were." If not for the preceding sentence, then "it" would (probably) be interpreted as meaning "that period of time [which I discussed in previous sentences or paragraphs]," also a singular noun phrase. Unless the antecedent of "it" is clearly a plural noun, you should usually prefer "it was" in constructions like this one.

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