While writing a personal statement, I wrote the following sentence.
“While shouldering many responsibilities at [company_name], I was the organiser of a speaker series, which sparked many discussions among the teams, ranging from X to Y”.
I was thinking of using a word
spurredinstead ofsparked.Would
spurredbe an appropriate word to be used in this context?
Answer
Discussions are usually sparked instead of spurred, though if a discussion is already happening then it could be spurred on. Think of something sparking a fire versus somebody spurring their horse to keep on moving (or to move faster).
You’ve got one nasty run on sentence there though. It’s not entirely clear what you’re actually trying to say (are you trying to tell them about the series that you organized or are you pointing out that you had a lot of responsibilities? And were the teams ranging from X to Y or were the discussion topics ranging from X to Y?) but as a general rule I’ve found that if you feel like you have to use a comma then you should think about just writing a new sentence. If something doesn’t sound good when spoken then it’s not going to sound good when it’s read.
Making a few assumptions about what you were trying to communicate, something like this might work better:
I was able to take on many responsibilities while at ____. Among these responsibilities was the organization of a series of lectures on ____. This series sparked many discussions, on a variety of topics ranging from X to Y, among the teams.
Changing “organise” to “organize” is just a matter of me using American spelling.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Heisenberg , Answer Author : Chib
