ohmyrichard
Member
- Joined
- May 24, 2008
- Member Type
- English Teacher
- Native Language
- Chinese
- Home Country
- China
- Current Location
- China
Dear teachers,
Yesterday afternoon, after class a student of mine asked me to help her improve her short essay writing. I discussed with her my thoughts about what ideas, words and sentence structures could be added to or deleted from her writing or corrected. But there is still one problem remaining unsolved. When I noticed that at the beginning of her essay she used the expression "with the advance of the society", I pointed out that before "society" no article needs to be used and I also told her that my instinct told me that "advance" should be changed to "advancement". Anyway, at that time I was not sure whether it would be right to change "advance" to "advancement". When I got home yesterday evening, I looked up the two words in my physical dictionaries and online ones but those dictionaries did not seem to help me get clear about the difference between the two words-or rather, they seemed to hint that these two words can be used interchangeably. Then I browsed the web and read some articles in which either "with the advance of society" or "with the advancement of society" is used, and some Q & A's concerning the uses of the two words. However, my problem remained unsolved since some guys claim that these two words can be used interchangeably while others suggest that they should be discriminated but unfortunately they did not explain clearly how to discriminate. Worse still, it is very difficult for me a non-native speaker of English to determine whether the author of a certain article or the answer provider is a native speaker of English whose linguistic intuition I can always rely on if they do not tell that they are a native or a nonnative.
Please help me with the problems: Which one do you native speakers of English use, "with the advance of society" or "with the advancement of society"? How to distinguish the two words? And which of the two should be used in the expression of "with the___ of technology"?
Thanks a lot.
Richard
Yesterday afternoon, after class a student of mine asked me to help her improve her short essay writing. I discussed with her my thoughts about what ideas, words and sentence structures could be added to or deleted from her writing or corrected. But there is still one problem remaining unsolved. When I noticed that at the beginning of her essay she used the expression "with the advance of the society", I pointed out that before "society" no article needs to be used and I also told her that my instinct told me that "advance" should be changed to "advancement". Anyway, at that time I was not sure whether it would be right to change "advance" to "advancement". When I got home yesterday evening, I looked up the two words in my physical dictionaries and online ones but those dictionaries did not seem to help me get clear about the difference between the two words-or rather, they seemed to hint that these two words can be used interchangeably. Then I browsed the web and read some articles in which either "with the advance of society" or "with the advancement of society" is used, and some Q & A's concerning the uses of the two words. However, my problem remained unsolved since some guys claim that these two words can be used interchangeably while others suggest that they should be discriminated but unfortunately they did not explain clearly how to discriminate. Worse still, it is very difficult for me a non-native speaker of English to determine whether the author of a certain article or the answer provider is a native speaker of English whose linguistic intuition I can always rely on if they do not tell that they are a native or a nonnative.
Please help me with the problems: Which one do you native speakers of English use, "with the advance of society" or "with the advancement of society"? How to distinguish the two words? And which of the two should be used in the expression of "with the___ of technology"?
Thanks a lot.
Richard
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