Grammar: 💡 Effective Word Choice & Style - Advanced (C2) - Lesson 6: Exploring Grammatical Ambiguity and its uses/avoidance

C2 Lesson 6: Understanding Grammatical Ambiguity Recognizing Multiple Meanings What you will learn: By the end of this lesson, you will be able to identify both lexical and structural ambiguity, rewrite sentences for clarity, and recognize when ambiguity is used deliberately for stylistic effect. As a master user of English, you know that clarity is usually our main goal. However, sometimes language can have more than one possible meaning. This is called ambiguity . At the C2 level, we learn to identify ambiguity, eliminate it when we need to be precise, and understand when skilled writers use it on purpose for effect. 1. Lexical Ambiguity (The Word Itself) Lexical ambiguity occurs when a single word has multiple meanings. Context usually makes the meaning clear, but not always. Ambiguous Sentence: "The fisherman went to the bank ." Interpretation 1: He went to a financial institution (a building). Interpretation 2: He went to the side of the river (a riverbank). 2. Structural Amb…