20 10 2015
Don’t Be a Freakin’ Idiom
Upon receiving my edits on an academic paper recently, the author—a non-native English speaker—questioned why I had changed “for reason of” to “for reasons of,” when there was only one reason cited in that sentence. It was a reasonable question for which I didn’t have a good answer, except that “for reasons of” is much more commonly used in English and therefore “for reason of” just doesn’t look right. Knowing this explanation would be wholly unsatisfying, I then suggested “because of” as an alternative, which probably is what I should have changed it to in the first place.
