Barb. No ill feelings ...sorry if you thought it was rude... i just took this sentence as an example and wanted to know if it was grammatically correct.
That's fine, but because it is such an uncommon reason, I wanted to make sure that you were not
trying to say something else -- namely, that you were ill with a cold.
Also, as ems pointed out,
couldn't means you were prevented from going to class, while
didn't suggests it was a choice. I also thought that if you were really prevented from doing so, illness was more likely.
Many times, posters are grammatically correct, but end up with a meaning they didn't intend. In this case, if you HAD meant you were ill, your meaning was not coming through. As it turns out, your intended meaning was exactly how it read.
I had a cold, I caught a cold, I was sick with a cold, I was feeling ill, etc -- those are things I would have recommended
IF that was what you had meant to say. (But you didn't, so you can file that away if you need to write something another time about being too ill to go to class.)