Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

Faith · Joined: 20 Jan 2003 Posts: 9 Location: California, USA

Can you tell me what is the right one?

Reasons for not accepting ....

Reasons of not accepting ....

Most religions belong in this category...

Most religions belong to this category...

He couldn't find no crime in me.

He couldn't find no guilt in me.

Three days later after he was buried,

Three days after he was buried,

If both are wrong, please let me know how I can write these sentences correctly.

Thank you.

Alejandro-62 · Joined: 15 Sep 2003 Posts: 4 Location: Argentina

I�m sure of only this two sentences:

Most religions belong to this category...

Three days after he was buried,

Please, wait for help from another one.
Good look,
Alejandro.

Corey · Joined: 23 Mar 2003 Posts: 445 Location: Costa Rica

Reasons for not accepting

Both are corect...

Most religions belong in this category

Most religions belong to this category

NEITHER are correct
He couldn't find no crime in me.

He couldn't find no guilt in me.

Should be ...

He couldn't find any crime in (with?) me.
He couldn't find any guilt in me.

This is redundant (repetitious)
Three days later after he was buried,

Three days after he was buried, - THIS is correct.

Good luck,

Corey
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asterix · Joined: 26 Jan 2003 Posts: 1654

You could say "He could find no guilt in me", too.

Nikita · Joined: 14 Sep 2003 Posts: 5 Location: Kharkov, Ukraine

Hi

I think I can teach you a trick how to check which alternative is right with a search engine. For example, you are asking which alternative is correct "reasons for not accepting" or "reasons of not accepting".

You need to go to Google's web site http://www.google.com or your beloved search engine and type the first alternative into the search field in QUOTATION MARKS. They are very important if you want to make it search for the whole phrase, not just the web pages which have words "reasons", "for", "not", "accepting" in any order! Then you click on the search button.

What is important is how many pages the search engine can find with the given phrase. You can easily see that Google can find 2,690 web pages with "reasons for not accepting", and only 9 pages with or "reasons of not accepting". Now you can see which alternative is the correct one or, at least, is preferred by a greater number of people.

Surely, you need to be critical why applying this approach. Using Google you can easily find 5,740 links to pages with the phrase "look forward to hear from you", which is totally incorrect. But it only means it is a really typical mistake. The number of pages with the correct version "look forward to hearing from you" is still much greater - about 425,000!

I hope it is of some help to you!

PS I also invite you to join our ESL mailing list. You can find the details on http://www.kovalyov.com/eng/list.html It's totally FREE!

Nikita Kovalyov
an English teacher
International House, Ukraine
----------------------------------
Quality English Teaching
http://www.kovalyov.com

Faith · Joined: 20 Jan 2003 Posts: 9 Location: California, USA

Thank you for your help.

I really appreciate it.

Corey · Joined: 23 Mar 2003 Posts: 445 Location: Costa Rica

That is a very interesting view regarding language validity Nikita.

Asterix is correct as well. In addition, just rememer you cannot put two negatives in the same phrase.

Good luck,

Corey
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advoca · Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 422 Location: Beijing

Forgive me for disagreeing. But 'reasons of' is not good English.

The correct usage is 'reasons for."

If you go to google and search in quotes (inverted commas) for "reasons of not applying" you will find that almost all of these entries are from non-native English countries (A lot from India.)

My advice to students; never use 'reasons of.' Always use 'reasons for.'