Recently, for a scientific publication, I wrote something like the following:
The sample consisted of all students at the age of 13 years or older.
However, I received this back from the language check changed into the following:
The sample consisted of all students who were 13 years of age or older.
While I see that the second versions indeed sounds a little nicer, I was wondering if the first version would be correct from a grammatical point of view when it is used for describing a group of people as opposed to, say, for describing the age of a person at which an event has occured.
Can I use "at the age of" for describing a group of people? If not, would anyone able to clarify the correct use of this phrase?
Best Answer
Since this is a scientific paper, if you wanted to include the number, you could also say "consisted of all students who were 13 years of age or older (n=158)."
A phrase often used to describe an age group is cohort:
Here is a picture using "age cohort" to illustrate.
So I might rewrite the sentence as: