Posts By Email
Grab The RSS“Owing to” vs “Due to”
Steve Campbell asks for a post on “the choice between due to and owing to.
There was a time that I felt very strongly about the difference between due to and owing to, zealously correcting misuse in student papers.
After all, one of my most esteemed authorities, H.W. Fowler, has this to say in Modern English Usage:
Under the influence of ANALOGY, due to is often used by the illiterate as though it had passed, like owing to, into a mere compound preposition.
He gives such examples as these of due to being used incorrectly:
The old trade union movement is a dead horse, largely due to the incompetency of the leaders.
Rooks, probably due to the fact that they are so often shot at, have a profound distrust of man.
The perceived error is that due to must be attached to a noun and not, says Fowler,
to a notion extracted from a sentence . . . it is not the horse, [or] the distrust of the rooks…that are due, but the failure of the movement, the distrust of the rooks . . .
Even now, I reach for an index card when I hear the local weatherman say, “The road is closed due to flooding.” Then I remind myself that the difference between due to and owing to is as much a dead horse as the “old trade union movement” in Fowler’s example.
For those who wish to go on beating the horse, due to is adjectival and owing to is adverbial. The road was closed owing to flooding. For the road to be “due to” anything, it would have to be something that influenced the existence of the road: The road was due to the efforts of local citizens who voted to raise taxes for its construction.
Here are two more examples for the sake of comparison:
His accident was due to excessive alcohol consumption.
His accident occurred owing to the fact that he was talking on his cell phone.
For most English speakers due to and owing to have become interchangeable. Trying to preserve a distinction between them is pointless. I’d rather direct my energy to the defense of “I” as a subject pronoun.
Related Articles
Share
Subscribe By Email And Get A Free eBook!
- Subscribe to Daily Writing Tips and you will be able to download our free ebook: "Basic English Grammar."
- You will also get all our grammar, spelling, punctuation and writing tips.
- The download link will go along with the first email (you might need to wait up to 24 hours).
8 Responses to ““Owing to” vs “Due to””
Got something to say?
Popular Articles
- 40 Yiddish Words You Should Know
- 10 Rules for Writing Numbers
- Vocabulary Test 1
- Passed vs Past
- Writing a Reference Letter
- Creative Writing 101
- 44 Resume Writing Tips
- Among vs. Amongst
- 6 Foreign Expressions You Should Know
- Let the Word Do the Work
- How to Format a US Business Letter
- That vs. Which
- 50 Incorrect Pronunciations To Avoid
- The Writing Process
- Inquire vs. Enquire
- 25 Pieces of Writing Software
- 12 Greek Words You Should Know
- Cannot or Can Not?
- What Does Sic Mean?
- Wether, Weather, Whether
- 34 Writing Tips To Write Better
- Yours Faithfully or Yours Sincerely?
- Latin Words and Expressions
- Grammar Test 1
- Program vs. Programme
That last example seems trite, and an incompetent argument.
“His accident occurred owing to the fact that he was talking on his cell phone.”
Yes, his use of the cell phone might be a fact, but there is a vast assumption about how that contributed to the accident. There is an assumed connection, one that is implied but not established.
Too many people are familiar with taking or making a cell phone call while walking, dining, driving a vehicle, or even during a conversation with other people. Unless each and every cell phone use causes an accident, then the the base statement that a cell phone was in use might be true, yet have nothing to do with the cause of the accident. What isn’t established is why an accident was related to the use of a cell phone this time, and not the millions of times that accidents don’t occur when cell phone is used.
I propose, “His accident occurred because he was distracted. He chose to engage in conversation rather than safely operate his vehicle. Because he conversed via cell phone, his conversation partner wasn’t immediately visible; thus his mind concentrated on aural cues rather than diligently incorporating visual information. His mind disengaged his sight during his conversation.”
I realize that the example is an illustration of “owing to”, and not an actual portion of persuasive writing. But the clumsy argument still caught my attention.
Brad K., what is incompetent is your point.
In the land of stories and fabricated examples, the writer can do whatever they please. Who’s to say Maeve’s example isn’t a truncated telling of a story involving an accident and a resulting in-depth investigation?
Brad K. is right. Eliminate both of these expressions from your writing. Instead, use strong, vivid verbs and specific details.
OK…the more I read DWT’s (and I have been reading each and every one not unlike a grammar junkie needing the fix.) the more I seem to doubt my own writing abilities, and worse, my skills as a teacher of English for over 27 years. The latest heartburn was the response to Steven Campbell’s angst over “due to” and “owing to” in which the response bogged me down, making me scream in my head that both expressions are colloquialisms and aren’t worth the ink DUE TO the fact that DUE TO simpley means because and is adverbial. The concluding examples are exemplars to my point:
His accident was due to excessive alcohol consumption.
His accident occurred owing to the fact that he was talking on his cell phone.
Accident is the Subject followed by a linking verb and ostensibly the cobbled prepositional phrase “due to…consumption.” Now, when I read this, I don’t see due to as adjectival as asserted in the response; rather, I see a simple adverbial prepostional phrase emanating from lazy colloquial writing. I would have marked the student paper with “‘Colloq.’ consider using a sub. conj. and recast with action verb/adverb clause” or something. The result would be a better sentence, a much better objective than quibbling the colloquialism:
The accident was caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
Seems to me that “owing to” screams for “because of”; hence, the following also pared down from the wordiness of the original:
His accident occurred [because of] his use of a cell phone.
Both are adverbial, and the split hairs of “due to” and “owing to” can be thrown out as irrelevant unless one is a language historian attempting to clarify their original uses and the devolution into common speech.
My goodness…my head hurts due to all of this.
@ Eric T. MacKnight,
I didn’t recommend avoiding or omitting these phrases. I merely objected to the single example when I read it as a statement or politically sensitive message.
“It should rain tonight, due to an approaching cold front,” is common and easily understood. But now I am conflicted about whether it is correct usage. . .
And I confess, I am more familiar with Owings Mills, MD, home of the late Louis Rukeyser broadcasts, than using “owing to” correctly or otherwise.
As far as I can tell, Brad’s comment has nothing to do with the post topic. He’s not arguing against the use of either “owing to” or “due to.” He’s ranting about blaming accidents on cell phone use.
Personally, given that I did not witness the accident in question, I am happy to accept Maeve’s initial assessment that the cellphone was the significant contributing factor.
From the information given it is conceivable that the ‘accident’ was that he poked himself in the eye with his phone antenna.
I think the original post does illustrate – as a side-effect – that all language carries sub-texts, and that no matter how carefully you say something, you cannot control how other people hear it.
i was realy in huge confusion but after these sensible examples i became aware the difference between owing to and due to.