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pretty much

keilah_5

Senior Member
Spanish - Spain
Can I put "pretty much" at the end of the sentence rather than before "everywhere"?

"I’ve been learning English since I was seven as it is a compulsory subject to be studied pretty much everywhere."
You can place "pretty much" at the end of the sentence, but "pretty much everywhere" sounds smoother and more ordinary to me than "...everywhere, pretty much." Placed at the end of the sentence, "pretty much" sounds like an afterthought. This sort of thing is much more common in speech than it is in writing.
You can place "pretty much" at the end of the sentence, but "pretty much everywhere" sounds smoother and more ordinary to me than "...everywhere, pretty much."
Yes, doing that makes it sound to me almost as if it was an afterthought: the writer decided it was perhaps a bit of a sweeping statement to say "everywhere" and so he/she perhaps ought to qualify it by tacking "pretty much" onto the end of it.
If it's placed at the end, after a comma, how do we know it modifies "everywhere"?👁 Smile :)
I'd regard as being equivalent to adding something like "more or less" to the end of that sentence. It modifies the thing it immediately follows, although I suppose you could regard as modifying the whole phrase "a compulsory subject to be studied everywhere".

But I don't see that it alters the underlying meaning significantly if you put it right at the end. 👁 Smile :)
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