To multilingual writers, search engines such as Google can provide a useful way of checking sentence structure and word usage. For example, if you are not sure whether you should use an infinitive form (to + verb) or a gerund (-ing) for the verb confirm after the main verb expect (57d), you can search for both “expected confirming” and “expected to confirm” in quotation marks to see which search term yields more results. A Google search for “expected confirming” yields many entries with a comma between the two words, indicating that one phrase ends with expected and another begins with confirming.

On the other hand, a search for “expected to confirm” yields many more hits than a search for “expected confirming.” These results indicate that expected to confirm is the more commonly used expression. Be sure to click through a few pages of the search engine’s results to make sure that most results come from ordinary sentences rather than from headlines or phrases that may be constructed differently from standard English.