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Do you "take" or "make" a decision?
A friend e-mailed me recently and asked why some people write (and say) "take a decision" instead of "make a decision". Being a good friend, he researched his own answer before I got around to replying. :-) His investigation suggested that "take a decision" is primarily British usage, whereas "make a decision" is more common in the US. A 'net denizen named "Trocco" provided the following insightful comment:
Indeed. "Taking a decision" still sounds very strange to me. As an Australian, I usually favour British usage (Did you spot the extra "u" back there?), but in this case the US usage seems far more natural. A quick bit of Googling (Did I just invent a word?) shows that, net wide, the "take" variant is used only 6.6% of the time. On UK web sites, though, this increases to 12%: almost double, but still a minority usage. And "no", it seems I didn't just invent the word "Googling". It's on around 165,000 web pages. Not even close, Tim!
You'll find many more helpful tips like these in Tim North's much applauded range of e-books. More information is available on his web site, and all books come with a money-back guarantee. http://www.BetterWritingSkills.com
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