shortly later

no.

i would use "a short time later" instead...

I thought of "shortly after". Is it OK?

"shortly later" was the reporter's version.

if you say "shortly after", you also have to indicate what happened before...

"Lim was arrested by police officers near Teban Gardens shortly after he escaped from prison."



i suppose you could say "shortly thereafter"...

"Lim was arrested by police officers near Teban Gardens shortly thereafter."

Famous (at least to British school kids of the 1950s) example of a wrong meaning caused by lack of punctuation:

King Charles walked and talked shortly after his head was cut off.

No. Shortly after.

Okay Con, "after" is collo but what's wrong w/ "later"

I keep forgetting exactly what it is you mean by "collo". You use it a lot. Is it short for "colloquial"? If so you are mistaken.

You can't say "shortly later".

Si

Okay Con but how exactly

Why not

Colloquial means 'informal', slangy', 'dialect', 'not literary' etc. Saying 'shortly after' is perfectly formal and correct.

"Shortly later" is definitely not usual. It’s not unusual to have one adverb modifying another (as in “rather soon” or “relatively later”), but a combination like “shortly later” sounds clunky to our ears.

I think that when people from (say) Singapore, who are ESL learners, come on here asking "can I say this?" they are usually asking about standard English, and it does no good at all to say that non-standard things (that nobody says) are kind of OK really because er, well, why not?

True Con but also means 'everyday'

https://www.google.com/?client=safari&channel=mac_bm#channel=mac_bm&q=define+colloquial

Yea Con, agreed, it does. However is it really wrong

Point well taken

Thanks, everybody.

Welcome Tang, from me and Con, we love ya