Word-Choice – “All” vs “All of These” in Formal Writing

word-choice

  1. Going to cinema, watching TV, going to park, all of these are exciting after a busy week.
  1. Going to cinema, watching TV, going to park, all are exciting after a busy week.

Are these sentences correct and convey the same meaning? which one is more appropriate for a formal writing?

Best Answer

They are both correct and equally appropriate for formal writing. But I would say the first is preferable. To explain why, I'll rephrase it using conventional word order:

Going to the cinema, watching TV, and going to the park are all very interesting after a busy week.

Your version disrupts the normal order. It does so to provide a grammatical subject for the verb are that is more easily understood than the chain of noun phrases in the conventional sentence. It also gives the noun phrases a special emphasis by introducing a slight pause.

But there is a cost to doing so. Your listener or reader cannot easily predict the direction in which the sentence is heading. And the word all on its own does not help very much. Its meaning might remain slightly ambiguous until the reader figures out that the grammar has changed a little. Is all a reference to what has come before, or is it a new idea?

All of these contains no such ambiguity because these clearly points backward to the noun phrases.

For maximum clarity, such sentences usually set off the sequence of noun phrases with a dash:

Going to the cinema, watching TV, going to the park—all of these are very interesting after a busy week.

This variation might be slightly more common:

Going to the cinema, watching TV, going to the park—these are all very interesting after a busy week.

Note that I have corrected your articles to match American usage.