Advocates - Idiom

[HemantR606]

Hello All,

This is a doubt inspired from Q38 in OG12.

One option contains the words 'advocates for'. Even though the option containing this can be eliminated on parallelism grounds, I have a doubt with the explanation saying that idiomatically, 'advocates' does not work with 'for'. I have tried to google this out but was unable to find any such idiom issue.

Is 'advocates for' really a wrong idiom?

Please help.

Add on doubt: I am not sure about the idiom 'inspired from' I used in the first sentence of this post too.


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Thanks,
Hemant

[RonPurewal]

if you want thing X to happen, you don't "advocate for X"; you just advocate X.

you'll sometimes see "person 1 advocated for person 2", but that's an informal usage that's not universally accepted. so, GMAC won't use it.

[RonPurewal]

Add on doubt: I am not sure about the idiom 'inspired from' I used in the first sentence of this post too.

"inspired by" (not "from").

this isn't actually an idiom; it's a perfectly ordinary passive-voice construction. (an OG item inspired your query --> your query was inspired by an OG item.)

"inspired from" is not a thing.

[AmmuS624]

Hi,

I also read on Manhattan/GMATClub/BTG that "advocates" for is not correct idiom. Today i saw below news headline in CNN website . Is below sentence wrong ?

Jon Stewart advocates for health program for 9/11 first responders.


Regards,
Amm

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Sure, the way CNN uses language isn't the same as the GMAT. That doesn't make it wrong; rather, GMAT follows a formal, slightly old-fashioned, and sometimes apparently arbitrary (but generally very consistent) style of English.