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>Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. This is British wri
by joonix 13y ago
>Without any judicial order,
the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a
basic right. A right that belongs to everybody.
This is British writing style. Brits leave off the preposition "from" in these types of sentences; Americans put it in.
American English: "Administration now seeks to stop me from exercising a basic right."
British English: "Administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right."
I'm not a linguistics or grammar expert so I can't name the proper terms for all this. I've just observed in the past that this is a "Britishism" that differs from American style. It's interesting to see it here. Snowden wouldn't write like that. IMO, he needs to ditch Wikileaks because they've done nothing but harm him and seem to only be interested in advancing their agenda.
- thorum 13y agoI think all this really says is he's working with a European editor. Which you'd kind of expect since Snowden is an IT guy, not a writer.
- adamconroy 13y agoNice work Sherlock. Except I must say as a counter example that I am British and I flip-flop between using 'from' and not using 'from' in such sentences.
- vinceguidry 13y agoYou might, but I've yet to read American writing that leaves out the 'from'. It certainly wouldn't ever occur to me to do that.
- mbillie1 13y agoAs an American who often adopts idioms and sentence structures from various things he reads, I will say (for me at least) that it depends entirely on how much, and what, you read :)
- bobwaycott 13y agoHardly convincing. I am American, and frequently edit my writing to remove extraneous "from"s and "that"s which make it into my sentences as a product of spoken habit. I usually try to make my writing habits a bit tighter than my speaking habits.