should i omit "for" in the following situation?

If you want to be super efficient you could trim that down to:

I overslept thirty minutes.

In your sentence "for" is unnecessary, but I doubt many would call you out on it.

i am just trying to figure out the most common and natural-sounding English speech. Would it be preferable to omit "for" or would it not matter?

For "common and natural sounding", I am slightly inclined to keep the 'for' in your example. Sometimes. I wouldn't even notice the difference most of the time.

If you want 'natural sounding speech', get rid of the 30 minutes and use 'half an hour' (British English) or 'a half hour' (US English). You are talking about spoken and not written English?

I'm interested in the "for" part. I know it's common to use half an hour in place of 30 minutes. And I guess I'm talking about verbal expression as a whole, so both spoken and written, although they do differ. Most common, natural-sounding, "good" English speech seems like an oxymoron, and maybe is one, but that's what I'm asking about.

1. I'm going in (to the [noun]) for (half an hour). OR, I'm going in (to the [noun] half an hour).

2. They completed their project for the whole class period. OR, they completed the project the whole class period.

In these examples, the inclusion of "for" seems better in terms of clarity, but I'm sure people using common speech forgo these. Would they be okay to also omit in writing?

The second example is not good English.

I'm going in (to the [noun]) ... the use of 'in to' here is problematic. Did you mean 'into'?

"for half an hour" ... 'for' used with periods of time expresses duration. 'I am going into the house for half an hour' means 'I am going into the house and will be there until half an hour has passed'.


This means they spent the whole class period completing their project.


Bad English.

Can't "going in" be a phrasal verb? So rather than say "going into" to mean " to enter," I'm saying "going in to the office" to mean "i'm going to do work--in the office"?

I don't think it's problematic.

I would write "I'm going into work/the office". When speaking, of course, there is little or no difference between 'in to' and 'into'.

Yes, but it would mean something different. Maybe it's an American thing.

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/08/in-to-versus-into/

The sentence itself is ceaselessly soporific.