more specifically, I was corrected when using "…without hesitance" and was asked to change it to "… without hesitation". Now I am confused. Was I wrong to say "ask questions without hesitance"?
To be even more exact. It was mentioned as a suggestion or a goal. For example:
Goals for Tom: Ask questions without hesitance
Which I was made to change to:
Goals for Tom: Ask questions without hesitation
After searching the internet a little bit, I think that they are synonyms so they should be interchangeable right? Or atleast interchangeable in that context? Basically what I want to know is was what I wrote downright wrong or in any need of correction?
Thank you
Best Answer
I don't think it's wrong, but hesitance is a fairly rare word. Here are some results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:
The numbers are the number of hits. We can see that hesitance is much less common than hesitation. Let's try searching for without hesitation / hesitance:
We can see that without hesitance is not something that people say very often if at all.
I have to say, my first thought when I saw without hesitance in your title was that it looked weird, but like I said, I don't think it's wrong. It's up to you: you can use it if you like, but you will risk sounding weird.