IELTS Vocabulary: editing and improving

You won't have time to do this in your test, but it's a good idea to edit and improve the essays that you write at home.

For example, in the music essay that I shared on Wednesday, there's a phrase that we could improve: "the planet's global language".

While this phrase is fine and wouldn't affect the essay's score, you could argue that it contains repetition because 'planet' and 'global' communicate similar meanings. Note: We could simply write "the planet's language" or "the global language", but I wanted to use this structure: noun + adjective + language.

So let's think about some possible alternatives:

1. the planet's shared language
2. the planet's common language
3. humanity's global language
4. our global language

Notice that I changed the adjective 'global' in the first two examples, I used a different noun (humanity) in example 3, and I used a pronoun instead of the noun 'planet' in example 4. Which alternative do you prefer?

Comments

[Mona]

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=music+is+a+universal+*%2Cthe+common+language+of+communication%2Chumanity%27s+global+language%2Cour+global+language%2Ccommon+language+of+the+world%2Ccommon+language+of+mankind%2Clingua+franca+of+international+communication%2Cmusic+is+the+universal+*&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmusic%20is%20a%20universal%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthe%20common%20language%20of%20communication%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccommon%20language%20of%20the%20world%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccommon%20language%20of%20mankind%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Clingua%20franca%20of%20international%20communication%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmusic%20is%20the%20universal%20language%3B%2Cc0

-> Music is a/the universal language (among the people of this planet?)

[Prasad Gandham]

Thank you very much Simon, for discussing about this point in a detailed way and clearing my confusion.