A friend e-mailed me recently and asked why some people write (and say) "take a decision" instead of "make a decision".
Being a good friend, he researched his own answer before I got around to replying. :-) His investigation suggested that "take a decision" is primarily British usage, whereas "make a decision" is more common in the US.
A 'net denizen named "Trocco" provided the following insightful comment:
I was also surprised at the number of times I've read and heard "take a decision" in the last couple of years. Most of the sources were British (BBC, The Economist), but I've also noticed it creeping a bit into American speech as well.
As far as I know, there is not yet a "decision-taking process". You can never be wrong with "decision-making process".
Indeed. "Taking a decision" still sounds very strange to me. As an Australian, I usually favour British usage (Did you spot the extra "u" back there?), but in this case the US usage seems far more natural.
A quick bit of Googling (Did I just invent a word?) shows that, net wide, the "take" variant is used only 6.6% of the time. On UK web sites, though, this increases to 12%: almost double, but still a minority usage.
And "no", it seems I didn't just invent the word "Googling". It's on around 165,000 web pages. Not even close, Tim!
By Tim North
info@betterwritingskills.com
http://www.BetterWritingSkills.com
