The definition provided by the Longman Dictionary of Idioms for “to keep/have one’s eyes peeled/skinned” is: to keep a steady and careful watch for something or someone often followed by for+P; often Imperative.
That’s fine, but what about the preposition used with this idiom.
Here are sentences from one of my student’s stories based on the idioms we study:
We know this failure tarnished our reputation considerably and realize what it will take us to win the market again, taking into account that everybody keeps their eyes peeled on us now. But Im sure well prove customers can trust us again.
Good luck to you!
I think this expression is not used in the sentence correctly; the idea is clear, but either the preposition is wrong or it should be used in an imperative sentence and not in a declarative one.
Right, you can’t keep your eyes peeled on something/someone. You can keep your eyes peeled for something/someone, but this means you’re watching and waiting for it/them to appear, which doesn’t seem right here. Basically, I think the “eyes peeled” expression doesn’t fit this sentence. You could say “everybody is keeping their eyes on us now”.
“Everybody keeps their eyes peeled regarding our company’s further moves or actions”?
The student wanted to insert as many idoms from a list attached to the unit he was assigned as possible, and one of them is “to keep one’s eyes peeled”.
If the sentence I just suggested does not fit in as well, then I will advise her to drop the sentence and change the story line a little.
I’m assuming you mean the first part of the sentence is unchanged, so you’d have:
“… taking into account that everybody keeps their eyes peeled regarding our company’s further moves or actions.”
I think this is now viable because “moves” and “actions” are things that you can watch and wait for. However, I would change “keeps” to “is keeping”.
I would personally also change “taking into account that” to “taking into account the fact that”, but many people might be happy with the former (this may be at least partially a BrE/AmE thing; I’m not sure).