Learn English – When you want to take some measures in order to prevent something from happening againg

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Imagine that, in a school, the principal notices that two students have had a bad fight and one of the students beat up the other one. The school's principal is talking to the other responsible individuals of the school in an emergency meeting and wants to say we have to take some measures to prevent these types of happenings from now on. He says:

  • We must act in a way so that these events will never take place again

  • We must act in a way so that these events will never happen again.

I have no idea if I've phrased the above examples properly and I'm not sure if they work properly to the native speakers. For me, they do, but I need a confirmation. If they don't, I would appreciate it if you could let me know how a native speaker would phrase it.

Best Answer

Those your examples are both perfectly good English, but they mean something slightly different than what you describe wanting to express. The expression "act in a way" suggests not actually doing different things, but doing the same things in a different way. To express that he "wants to say we have to take some measures to prevent these types of happenings from now on " that is better expressed as "take action".

So:

We must take action so that these events will never happen again.

That said, as @J.R. observed, that's rather wordy. (Which is perfectly in keeping with some principals of my acquaintance!) In particular "these events" is superfluous and can usually be replaced by "this". So it might also be expressed:

We can’t let this ever happen again.

We must not let this happen ever again.

We must prevent this from ever happening again.

We must take action to prevent this ever happening again.

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