Even Greener Pastures

I need help, please. My language partner learned the verb "to cope" and asked me if he could form the following sentence:

I cope with adversity with determination.

He wasn't sure about the two "with" in a row. I said I wasn't sure either and would probably use "through" instead. I cope with adversity through determination. I tried googling it but couldn't find a similar sentence so I promised to ask some native speakers.

I think he meant that determination was the thing that was helping him to cope and not that determination was just something accompanying the process (like "with a smile on my face").

Thanks!

Thanks a lot.

I think both constructions are grammatically correct, so you both are right, but when I read your use of “through” to avoid repeating “with” it sounded stylistically better. I mean it just sounded better to my ear, but the other sentence was okay too, probably so much so that few would notice.

I used to tell people on italki a sentence might be grammatical correct, but poor stylistically. That’s what English professors at universities really get into with native speakers. Not how to make grammatically correct sentences (maybe sometimes) but stylistically better ones. One thing I do at work, especially in revising things my clients have written, who are native speakers and send me things they write to file with the court, is re-writing their sentences for them to make them stylistically better.

One thing I learned early on is to avoid repetition. I heard someone say once (who was a PhD from Sanford) “well, I used THAT word/verb already once in the sentence before, so I can’t use it again.”  I always thought that was a good rule of thumb, and I suppose that’s why languages have so many synonyms, for stylistic betterment. If you used the same words over and over again it would demonstrate a limited vocabulary and sound almost repetitious.
I have a client, an Air Force captain, with a college degree, and who is a native speaker, write up a declaration for me to file with the court. He did a good job of it, but wrote “because my wife hates me..” I told him it all sounded good, but to drop the “my wife hates me”. There’s something wrong with saying that, and it’s not going to sound good to the judge. So, I told him to say something different and softer, like `because my wife disapproves of me`, It’s stylistically better for the context. Does that sort of make sense? It could just be a legal thing too.

You could also say “I cope with diversity by determination.” Jerry’s suggestions is good too. But, it’s like any fitting preposition other than repeating “with” is stylistically better.

I wish I knew a rule, but I don't. I just know that repeating 'with' more than once sounds odd to me. Ex: "I cope with adversity with determination and with prayer and with coffee."
It's probably okay grammatically but I can believe that it's good form. Maybe a teacher { SuKi } can put a finer point on it.

Yeah, repetition is to be avoided for stylistic rather than grammar reasons. There’s a stylist trick I always use to improve sentences like the example Jerry gave, by shortening them.  First you have to be sure you can match the preposition with the noun you are using because you can’t always. To improve Jerry’s sentence you can saying “I cope with adversity though determination, prayer and coffee.” You can cope with a problem through prayer and I’m fairly sure you could say “through coffee.” It sounds slightly off to me or maybe just colloquial Californian or something, but I’m sure you can get away with it since “though” suggests “by means of.”

I told people on italki that English is a language of brevity that dislikes long words and sentences. The strongest sentences are those that pack a lot of meaning in them with few words. Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, mathematician, sort of a genius in about everything, once wrote an essay “How I write” and he explains just that. When he was about 12, while all the other boys were playing football outside, he was in his grandmother’s study reading every book she had (he’s 12 and reading Nietzsche and all the other boys are playing outside- he was a rare one). He said he used to enjoy a little exercise. He’d take a sentence and play around with it and see if he could condense it into as few words as possible without losing meaning or clarity. Through this he became a brilliant writer.