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Old 06-22-2013, 09:46 PM   #10
gmw
cacoethes scribendi
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I shouldn't start threads at 2:30am, I can see that I left things a little unclear. My main concern is about mixing the forms - using both forward and forwards in my text (and various other *ward/s combinations), I wasn't really talking about placing towards and forwards together (in fact the example given by crich70 shows pretty much the sort of thing that I've needed to correct - there is no need to say he went forwards to the front).

This sentence: "I look forward to meeting her."
sounds better to me than: "I look forwards to meeting her."

But this: "Moving forwards was easier."
sounds better to me than: "Moving forward was easier."

Though to my ear that second example is less definite, and seems context sensitive (what sounds better to me depends on what was around it). Searching through my text I can see that I use forward much more than forwards, despite the text being otherwise British English. I appear to be less definite with toward vs towards.

Here is a curious fragment from one of my chapters that shows my inconsistency with toward/towards: "The four of them were swept helplessly towards the gaping holes. His friends were being dragged inexorably toward one of the holes, but John could feel himself being caught by a current that tried to pull him toward the other."

Obviously the fragment needs work, but as you can see it was written with one "towards" and two "toward". I couldn't tell you why it came out this way, and I can happily accept replacing "toward" with "towards" or vise-versa in this case. I was more curious about whether mixing the forms would be considered an error, or in poor style.
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