“The reason . . . is because”
Avoid the construction
You’ll often hear and read sentences like these: “The reason I want to sleep is because I’m tired,” “The reason I asked the question was because I wanted to know the answer,” “The reason I called you was because I wanted to stay in touch.”
A Grammatical Explanation
There are two objections to the construction “the reason . . . is because.” The first is that it’s redundant — that is, the word because unnecessarily repeats the meaning of the word reason (as the word bachelor unnecessarily repeats the meaning of the word unmarried in the construction “unmarried bachelor”). The second objection is that a complement should not be introduced with the subordinating conjunction because (in “The reason I want to sleep is because I’m tired” the complement is the clause “I’m tired”).
A Conventional Option
If a clause follows “the reason . . . is,” it should be introduced with the subordinating conjunction that: “The reason I want to sleep is that I’m tired.”
Another Conventional Option
We can produce a better, shorter sentence by saying or writing something like “I want to sleep because I’m tired,” but if we begin a sentence with “the reason . . . is” and if we want to end it with a clause, we should introduce the…
