"Due To" vs "Owing To" / "Because Of" in Technical English
5 exercises — practise "due to", "owing to", and "because of" precision in postmortems and status reports.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "due to" as an adjective phrase after a linking verb?
"The delay was due to an unexpected spike in database load" is correct: "due to" here functions as an adjective phrase after the linking verb "was", correctly modifying the subject "delay". Option B uses "due to" after an action verb ("happened"), which is traditionally considered less correct in formal style (a preposition like "because of" fits action verbs better). Option C incorrectly follows "due to" with a full clause ("we had"), but "due to" must be followed by a noun phrase, not a clause. Option D reverses cause and effect, producing a meaningless fragment.
2 / 5
Choose the sentence that correctly uses "because of" as an adverbial phrase modifying an action verb.
"The deployment failed because of a missing environment variable" is correct: "because of" is a prepositional phrase that correctly modifies the action verb "failed", followed by a noun phrase. Option B incorrectly combines "due to" with "of", which is not a valid expression. Option C incorrectly uses "because of" as if it were an adjective phrase after a linking verb, which is unnatural ("due to" fits that slot instead). Option D drops "of", but plain "because" requires a full clause, not just a noun phrase.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "owing to" in a formal postmortem, followed by a noun phrase?
"Owing to a misconfigured firewall rule, external traffic was blocked for two hours" is correct: "owing to", like "because of", is a formal prepositional phrase followed directly by a noun phrase. Option B incorrectly follows it with a full "that"-clause, which "owing to" cannot take. Option C incorrectly drops "to", but "owing" alone is not the fixed preposition. Option D incorrectly adds "of" after "owing to", duplicating the preposition.
4 / 5
Select the sentence that correctly avoids using "due to" as a sentence-initial adverbial before an action verb, in the strictest formal style.
"Because of increased load on the queue, message processing slowed significantly" is correct: in the strictest formal usage, "because of" (or "owing to") is preferred to open a sentence modifying an action verb, reserving "due to" for adjective-like slots after linking verbs. Option B incorrectly combines "due to" with "of". Option C misplaces "due to" mid-sentence with no clear noun to modify, producing a nonsensical fragment. Option D incorrectly drops "to" after "owing".
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly shows "due to" modifying a noun within a noun phrase, not the whole clause?
"Errors due to network timeouts were the most common category in the logs" is correct: here "due to network timeouts" functions as an adjective phrase directly modifying the noun "errors", a core, universally accepted use of "due to". Option B is a garbled, ungrammatical construction with a stray "due" at the end. Option C uses "because of", which is more naturally adverbial and reads awkwardly modifying a bare noun without a verb. Option D incorrectly omits "to" after "due".