Which is correct? Is it "as of late" or "of late", is the "as" part necessary?
Also, can you give me a couple of different examples of sentences using the two? Is there a word that is used similarly to those particular words, that i can use to substitute the words "as of late" and "of late" with, so i don't get confused and know how to use them?
Does the following sentence "and as of late he has agreed to return home" make sense? If not, then can you restate the sentence?
EDIT: The thing is I've already used the word recently (twice) in the same paragraph and i'm meant to be writing a formal letter.
Is the sentence correct or not? Because this is the first time I've used this site and the answers are "disorderly".
Thanks again 🙂
Best Answer
There seems to be some evidence that as of late (in the sense of recently) was perhaps a bit more common a century or two ago, but I think including as has never been the norm. For all that, I can't really imagine a context where OP's example...
...would be considered "natural", even if we removed as. The reason it doesn't work is because of late in such contexts means during the time period stretching from the present moment to the relatively recent past. That's to say, things happening of late are normally things which either take some time to complete, or which can happen repeatedly (unlike, say, a single act of agreement).
As @Edwin succinctly notes, lately/of late apply to durative (rather than "punctive") recent actions.
In OP's case, the natural phrasing would be...