Generate a massive awareness?

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
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1

I always thought that ‘awareness’ is an uncountable noun but I’ve just come across the following phrase uttered by native speaker from the US:

The goal with these things has always to be to generate a massive awareness before the lunch.

I mean, if you can put an ‘a’ before ‘awareness’ it makes it a countable noun, doesn’t it?

2

A massive awareness sounds fine to me. I can’t explain why though. No it doesn’t make it countable.

generate awareness
generate an awareness
generate massive awareness
generate a massive awareness

Those all seem OK to me.

I can even see “generate the awareness” being said. In this case it would mean a specific type of awareness. Maybe that’s the key. There can be more than one type of awareness.

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3

I don’t see a problem with “an awareness”, though I can’t conceive of using “awarenesses” even though a person might be aware of several different things.

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