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Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

601 - 'Based In' or 'Based Out Of.' Omitting 'That'

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.52.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2017

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Based on, based off, based in, based out of...people are changing the way they use prepositions with "based." Also, people can get overzealous about deleting every "that" they can find in a sentence. Here's why you need it sometimes. FOLLOW GRAMMAR GIRL Twitter: http://twitter.com/grammargirl Facebook: http://facebook.com/grammargirl Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/realgrammargirl Instagram: http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl GRAMMAR POP Optimized for iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grammar-pop-hd/id666851934?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 For all iOS Devices: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grammar-pop-hd/id666851934?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 GRAMMAR GIRL BOOKS http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl-book-page THE GRAMMAR DAILY 2018 CALENDAR http://amzn.to/2f8jPDG Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. Check out all the Quick and Dirty Tips shows: www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Grammar girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty.

0:04.8

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about based phrases and a meaty middle about when

0:10.2

to leave the word that out of your sentences.

0:13.7

Let's get started.

0:15.8

A few years ago I ran an episode about how I was hearing a lot of speakers saying based

0:21.2

off instead of based on.

0:24.0

The cheerful example I used was I believe we're all doomed based off what I saw last night.

0:29.9

Instead of I believe we're all doomed based on what I saw last night.

0:34.9

In that episode I said that the usage really took off in the 1990s, although based on

0:40.5

is still in the majority.

0:42.7

Well now I have some further information about based off and an interesting parallel with

0:47.8

another construction involving the word based.

0:52.5

First some more specific numbers for based on.

0:56.1

A 2013 post by Ann Kersan in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Linguafranca blog, compared

1:03.0

based on with based off of in the Google and Graham viewer and found that in the year

1:08.0

2000 based on outnumbered based off of by a ratio of 100,000 to one.

1:15.8

But that by 2008 the ratio had decreased to just 10,000 to one.

1:21.6

A search of the corpus of contemporary English, also called Koka, has different numbers

1:26.8

but the same trend.

1:28.8

In the early 1990s based on outnumbered based off by almost 13,000 to one.

1:35.4

But in the years from 2010 through 2015 it lost ground and outnumbered based off by only

1:41.5

about a thousand to one.

...

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