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the incriminated sentence is the following, from this article. Notice the repeated "it's":

The company is planning to introduce its SUV Model X next month, it’s designing its Model 3 car, it’s building a huge battery factory near Reno, Nevada, and it’s scaling up its grid battery business, which will sell batteries to utilities, companies and homeowners to connect to the power grid.

As an Italian, I find the repetition of the subject horrifyingly redundant, but... maybe it is correct English?

2 Answers 2

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This sort of repetition is grammatically unexceptionable; more importantly, it is a very common rhetorical device to give a series of parallel predicates extra impulse toward the end and prevent them from falling drearily off. You have to read it with your ears and not just your eyes.

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It is grammatically correct, but indeed not very tidy. The pronoun and contracted verb it's could simply be elided and the sentence would remain perfectly correct:

The company is planning to introduce its SUV Model X next month, designing its Model 3 car, building a huge battery factory near Reno, Nevada, and scaling up its grid battery business, which will sell batteries to utilities, companies and homeowners to connect to the power grid.

Stilistic errors are not "wrong" grammatically, but the fact that we call them "errors" shows that there are better ways to write sentences like this.

Additionally, the repetition of it's is not the only thing that could be changed in order to improve this sentence in my humble opinion. The sentence could be split into two and fiddled around with a bit in order to improve its readability, but all this is just a matter of personal preference and the writer is free to phrase his words as he pleases or as he thinks they should be phrased for his public to be willing to read his text.

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  • I think that with the sentence revised as above, you have grouped the last three actions, leaving the first one separated for no apparent reason. My mind inserts a semicolon after "next month". Or maybe even an em dash. It seems as if the latter three, grammatically, are now restating the first, but semantically, they're not. So it would be better to remove ALL of the it's, to preserve the parity of all four actions. Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 12:11

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