Yesterday, I had a Grammar exam and I came across this question, I tried to look everywhere on the internet but I couldn’t find anything related since “used to” always comes as a habit and followed with a contrast.
The sentence is “He used never to drink so much coffee, before he went to bed.” According to the question, it must have two mistakes, so my answer was:
“He used to drink so much coffee, before he goes to bed.”The exam now is nothing I’m worried about, I just want to benefit so I don’t make a mistake again.
Answer
Gary’s Student gives you the answer your examiner was almost certainly looking for.
He never used to drink so much coffee before he went to bed.
The comma in the original marks before he went to bed as supplemental and thus an adjunct to the main clause; that implies, absurdly, that for a long time he did not go to bed and it was only when he finally did so that he started drinking coffee.
The placement of never in the original marks used as an ordinary catenating verb like want or hope. This is by no means ungrammatical, but today it is so rare that it almost has to be regarded as ‘obsolete’. In present-day English we treat used to as an inseparable fixed phrase, virtually an independent ‘modal’ verb: useta, conjugated only in the past tense.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Ghassan Saeed , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
