How come no one says ‘because’ anymore?
Not long after classes went online last year, I started to notice a change in my students’ writing: the word “because” all but disappeared, only to be replaced by “due to” in nearly every instance to express cause and effect, something that almost always leads to grammatically incorrect and awkward sentences.
No doubt this shift can be attributed to the ubiquitousness of that phrase we hear on a daily basis, “due to COVID-19.” But how do we use “due to” and how does it differ from “because (of )”?
Without getting overly grammatical, “due to” explains the reason for a noun (or thing), while “because of” explains the reason for a verb (an action). A simple way to remember this is if you can say “caused by,” you can say “due to.”
“I couldn’t come to class due to work” is something a student recently said to me. The sentence doesn’t work because you can’t substitute “due to” for “caused by,” and that’s because the relationship between work and her inability to come to class isn’t clear.
What she should have said is “I couldn’t come to class because I had to work.” On the other hand, a sentence like “His broken leg was due to a fall” makes sense because the words “caused by” and “due to” are interchangeable.
Take another example: “I chose this story due to it being well written.” Not only does this sentence similarly fail the “caused-by” test, but it also doesn’t correspond to how “due to” is used, which is to explain the reason for a negative outcome, not something positive.
Instead of “due to,” the phrase should read “because it was well written.”
Indeed, this grammatically flawed, wordy phrase, “due to it being” (which really means “because”) is one that I’ve started to see increasingly frequently in my students’ writing. This illustrates the enormous difficulty they have in expressing cause and effect when limiting oneself to “due to” — a problem that’s exasperated by teachers who mislead students into thinking that one can’t start a sentence with “because,” which is false. A sentence beginning with “because” will be a dependent clause (can’t stand alone as a sentence), and must be followed by a comma and an independent clause (one that can stand alone as a sentence). So when I read something like, “Due to it being hard, I failed the test,” what I see is the effect of this erroneous proscription that prevents students from simply writing: “Because it was hard, I failed the test.”
Apart from the word “because,” what students need to learn and practice, and what the reader will notice in this piece here, is that there are numerous strategies to express cause and effect, some of which include: “attributed to,” “for,” “as a result,” “thanks to,” “owing to,” “the effect of,” “since,” and “as.”
Unfortunately, if we limit ourselves to “due to,” not only do we severely limit our ability to communicate coherently, but, I’m afraid, another unexpected outcome of the pandemic will be a linguistic one.