The Diction Grinch is worried about the expression of cause and effect in writing. For example: “Credit is due to the House Minority Whip for arranging bipartisan support of today’s trade bill.” We all like to give credit where it’s due, and here the expression is used correctly. Quite often, though, you read something like this: “Due to weather patterns of the past decade, crops in sub-Saharan Africa have failed repeatedly.” That’s a different “due to”: We’re not exactly trying to establish credit here, but cause. And that can become tricky. Are we really establishing cause, for example, or just correlation?
The sentence about the African crops doesn’t explain how the weather was involved. The next sentence of the passage might, but sometimes it doesn’t. So you may never learn whether the weather was too hot or cold or dry or wet. That’s because “due to” is used here only to connect two parts of the sentence. (“He ran downhill due to the bear” is a textbook example.)
One of my writing teachers described terms such as “due to” and “owing to” as “mere copulatives.” That’s an earthy description, and vivid too. Why do we use terms like these when they obscure meaning rather than clarify it?
The answer is partly habit, and the easiest quick fix may be to think of a different way to say what you mean. Often you’ll get to the point faster. Instead of “due to,” trying starting with “because” (not “because of,” which means the same thing as “due to” or “owing to”). The use of “because” forces you to explain how the previous phrase is related to the next. “Crops in sub-Saharan Africa have failed repeatedly because the weather has been so dry for a decade.”
Other careless expressions go along with “due to” and its friends. They aren’t copulatives, but they give the impression of saying something when you’re not. Take “the nature of.” This instantly makes you sound deep, as if there were other ineffable layers of meaning that everyone else is missing. (They’ll continue to miss it if you don’t explain it directly.) Canadian science presenter David Suzuki’s excellent television show was called The Nature of Things, a title that did little to explain what the show was about. So ask yourself: rather than say “the nature of,” how could I explain what’s important here?
Sometimes these problematic phrases are combined—for example, in the expression “due to the nature of,” which I often encounter especially in the scientific literature. But there’s a simpler word in English: because. It’s more direct, and sounds less stuffy and bureaucratic. It doesn’t assume that the audience understands that vague “nature.” It helps us to connect, and so to communicate.
Kevin Padian (Integrative Biology)
Originally published: Volume 1 – Number 2 (Fall 2000)