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Hi there! I am Tim, from Wall Street English.
Today we are going to talk about different ways of making suggestions. It’s important to pay attention to the tone we use when suggesting casually and formally depending on different situations.
Let’s imagine you are supposed to have a meeting at twelve o’clock but would like to start earlier to fit another appointment onto your schedule.
The basic idea here is:
I want to have the meeting earlier. I suggest half-past eleven.
For a more casual way of suggesting, we could say:
Let’s have the meeting earlier at half-past eleven!
OR
Why don’t we have the meeting earlier, at half past-eleven?
For a more formal way of suggesting, we could say:
I was wondering if we could have the meeting earlier, at maybe half past eleven?
Or even more formally, we could say:
I was wondering if there would be a chance we could have the meeting earlier, perhaps at half-past eleven?
Adding maybe or perhaps will make it sound even more formal.
There are many people who would like to be more direct and use the word suggest in their sentences but many people make the mistake of putting ‘to’ after the verb ‘suggest’, which makes this grammatically incorrect. Here are the correct ways of using them:
I suggest having the meeting earlier at half-past eleven.
OR
I suggest we have the meeting earlier at half-past eleven.
Noticed that we didn’t use ‘to’ in these two examples. This is because when using the verb suggest, we either use a noun or gerund, the ‘-ing’ form or the subject with the bare infinitive form, the verb without ‘to’.
So be sure to pay attention to the verb forms used after the verb suggest.
That’s all for this episode of 2-minute English. I hope you’d learned lots about making suggestions, and of course, have a great day.
