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Related to: How to avoid the repetition of "of"?

The post above recommends rearranging the sentence to avoid such repetition but it is difficult for me to do this.

Speaking from the perspective of the majority of the population...

One that I have come up with is:

Speaking from the majority of the population's perspective...

But then it sounds weird to me with the repetition of the.

I am not a native speaker, so can someone verify if my sentence is correct or come up with a better suggestion?

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    As a native speaker, I think there is no reason to avoid repeating "of". It sounds fine and it's the simplest way to express things.
    – stangdon
    Nov 25, 2015 at 15:29
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    I agree with stangdon that the repetition is not really a problem. But the statement could be simplified, to "Most people would say...". Nov 25, 2015 at 17:57

2 Answers 2

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Speaking from the perspective of the majority of the population...

This sentence is actually the better option, because it correctly links the noun phrases, and it is not recommended to change it.

Speaking from the majority of the population's perspective...

This sentence is actually not so good, because the "'s" is here attached to "population", which isn't really what you want. Consider the following:

Speaking from the advocates of corporal punishment's perspective... [Very weird if not wrong!]

In general you don't need to always avoid repetition of "of", unless it becomes too many, in which case you can avoid it by changing the focus, such as:

For the majority of the population, their perspective is that ...

Or you can say the same thing in a different way:

To the majority of the population, [however,] ...

Here are some perfectly acceptable examples of repeated "of" from BBC:

deadly grip of birds of prey

the story of one of the literary treasures of the medieval world

the contributions of some of the giants of mathematics

over the course of hundreds of thousands of years

the sequence of bases of a section of DNA

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    +1) for not recommending to change it.
    – user24743
    Nov 25, 2015 at 15:13
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The sentence as written is fine, but I would prefer to make it more direct. Something along the lines of:

The majority of the population believes…

You would need to modify the verb ('believes') to fit your exact meaning, of course. Though your original sentence is fine, a more direct approach often makes for more lively, interesting writing.

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