student asking question

Is it okay to say "crushing" and "making" instead of "crush" and "make" after "what we need to do is"?

teacher

Native speaker’s answer

Rebecca

Unfortunately, using the present progressive tense does not work in this case. Using "crushing" and "making" is grammatically incorrect here. You can only use "crush" and "make" here. If you wanted to use -ing verbs here, you would need to change the beginning of the sentence to something like "what we are doing is crushing the fibers and making them weak enough ..." Ex: What we need to do is mix the ingredients together. = What we are doing is mixing the ingredients together.

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