So, Grammarly is correcting me a lot on a phrase I tend to use, and I don’t entirely understand the difference.
On a sentence that expands upon a previous sentence in dialog, I tend to have a character say “Which means […]”
Grammarly wants to fix this to be “This means […]”
It’s become clear to me that I tend to use ‘which’ instead of ‘this’ when speaking, but I am not sure why one is preferred use over the other.
Can anyone offer me some insight? I already tried googling “which vs this”, but I got results for “which vs that” instead, which is an entirely different use case.
“Which” to me indicates options exist to enumerate, but several aren’t mentioned, whereas ‘This’ is to expressly define something previously mentioned. I believe this to be the case that Grammarly is applying.
However, from a usage perspective, I feel the usage of ‘which’ or ‘this’ (along with '‘that’) frequently add no information to a sentence, and is best to be removed unless your text is trying to be conversational (where words are added for courtesy or to help with fluency).