Writing explanatory sentences and use of を

Question

I was attempting to write the following sentence in Japanese: That should help stop the infection that is causing the cough.

I came up with:

それは咳をさせる感染を止めることを手伝うべきです。

But it got corrected to:

それは咳をとめる薬です

I can understand making things more brief. I definitely don’t think I was 100% right. I feel like there is too many uses of を. But with this type of correction I cannot tell how wrong my original explanation was.

So how wrong was I? How should these explanation type sentences be written?

Answer 1

It's more about idiomaticity and collocation than the usage of を.

感染

To me, 感染 is a one-shot event and if that happens, it is not something you can stop (in this sense infection sounds to me the same, perhaps in line with Angelos's comment; or at least 感染 is not a good word for infection here). So 感染を止める is not idiomatic. It would mean at best the spread of infection.

咳をさせる

More properly, it would be 咳を引き起こす

助ける

In the sense of being useful, 役に立つ is the only choice. Or 助けになる could be used, but sounds less natural.

べき

Roughly, べき means obligation and はず means the speaker's confidence. Here it is the latter - so it should be はずです.

So, although それは咳をとめる薬です (or それは咳止めです) is more natural, an okay version of the sentence retaining as much of yours as possible would be

• それは咳を引き起こす病気を治すことに役立つはずです

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One general point is that inanimate subjects + action would be much less common in Japanese. So X would help... usually needs rephrasing if you want to say it naturally in Japanese.