Ben and I have widely differing views on this issue
Is there any difference between these sentences? Can I use these sentences interchangeably?
1. Ben and I have widely differing views on this issue.
2. Ben and I have widely different views on this issue.
Top answer
There may be a case that (1) is more suitable if you mean that your view differs from Ben's, while (2) is more suitable if your views both differ from those of a third person, but this is far from clear-cut. Probably for most people in normal reading there would be no significant difference in meaning. My initial feeling on reading the sentences was that "widely differing views" seemed a more usual collocation.
- There may be a case that (1) is more suitable if you mean that your view differs from Ben's, while (2) is more suitable if your views both differ from those of a third person, but this is far from clear-cut.
- Probably for most people in normal reading there would be no significant difference in meaning.
- My initial feeling on reading the sentences was that "widely differing views" seemed a more usual collocation.
- content=widely+differing+views%2Cwidely+different+views&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3
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There may be a case that (1) is more suitable if you mean that your view differs from Ben's, while (2) is more suitable if your views both differ from those of a third person, but this is far from clear-cut. Probably for most people in normal reading there would be no significant difference in meaning. My initial feeling on reading the sentences was that "widely differing views" seemed
0Ngrams is often nothing more than a measure of how popular a mistake has become. Your views differ widely. Your views are not widely different. I wonder what Ngrams says about "widely different".
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