The construction was "to help to do", But to help is used so often with an infinitive that speakers began to consider it something like a modal verb such as can, may etc and began dropping "to". "to help" isn't yet a modal verb but the drop of "to" might be a first step to changing the status of this verb. Have a look at "need". It can be used as a full verb and as a modal verb. Today it is ...
Just saw this: "prefer ~ing" / "prefer to infinitive" and I am wondering if there are any differences between "prefer doing" and "prefer to do". I have read a book about gramma...
In which way can the verb 'allow' be used? There is always some confusion and apparently it's often intuitively used wrongly. Which form corresponds to correct English, eventually depending on cont...
Both "confide in" and "confide to" are used, but they differ in meaning and their placement in a sentence. But it is worth mentioning that the phrasal verb "confide" usually goes with the preposition "in", and it is actually an idiom. Here Ngram shows that. "Confide in [someone]" means: To trust someone with one's secrets or personal matters. "Confide [something] in/to [someone]" means: To ...
Two senses of both "depart" and "departure" are 1) going from one place to another, and 2) leaving one job and taking another job. For sense 1, it seems that "depart/departure" should be follo...
For me/to me all that matters is how much it will cost. First off, I would say the word order here could be improved: I'd recommend going with "All that matters to me/for me is how much it will cost". The order you used puts a stress on the first part: I'd expect to see these sentences in comments such as "I know you care about the time it'll take, but for me/to me all that matters is how much ...
You can simply say "Added Angela and Peter to recipient list" but as @jwpat7 said, the list of the recipients is normally visible to everybody who receives the email. It be could useful to list those who receive the email when the recipient list shows just the email addresses, and you want to be sure the others know exactly who is receiving the email. Suppose that the email address is apaderno ...
But I could see a context such as "December is a special time. It is a time to celebrate a great many religious holidays, it is a time to say goodbye to the past year and it is a time to welcome a new year." In that example (which I just made up), "a time" is still general, as it's not a specific instance of the many Decembers that occur over the course of years.
in order to communicates purpose or intent rather than timing. You can simply use to instead, and your sentence will be correct, but in order to makes explicit the actor's reasoning for performing the first action.
The previous answers are not quite right, but it's a very tricky question. The third example, "to get out of debt" is a bit of an exception. One reason to use 'get' instead of 'getting' here is because get makes a nice rhyme with debt, for the purpose of selling books. So I wouldn't use that one as an example of typical usage. I think the default is actually 'getting' instead of 'get.' However ...
