I would like to know if this sentence is written correctly. I'm trying to explain why we missed the sales target.
The miss to sales target was caused by ....
-
4Welcome to ELL.SE. Please note that this is not a proofreading service; we can, however, assist you if you can identify a specific point of grammar or usage which confuses you. What is the entire sentence? Why do you think your phrasing is or is not acceptable? As currently written, I'm afraid your question is not answerable; we cannot even say if miss to sales target should be miss to the sales target or not because of lack of context.– chosterCommented May 28, 2019 at 15:01
-
2But I would say that the following all improve upon the original phrasing. (1) The sales target was missed because... (2) The failure to reach the sales target was caused by... (3) We missed the sales target because...– ChaimCommented May 28, 2019 at 18:17
-
1The missing of the sales target... is syntactically valid, but not very idiomatic.– FumbleFingersCommented Nov 1, 2023 at 3:49
-
It depends if you want to say "we missed the sales target" or you are deliberately being vague about whose fault it is.– Stuart FCommented Oct 16 at 10:37
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
I would say that the sentence is not correct, and a corrected version would start with
"The miss of the sales target..."
or
"The miss of our sales target...
or
"The miss of the department's sales target..."
or similar.
However, I think even the corrected version still sounds awkward and long-winded. Instead I would say
"We missed our sales target because..."
or
"We missed our sales target. The miss was caused..."
or
"The department missed its sales target because..."
or perhaps even
"Our sales target miss was caused..."
(That last one is a bit German in style, chaining three nouns in a row into a noun phrase -- I think it's acceptable in English, but I could imagine some people finding it confusing.)
