preceding/previous

[Maybo]

Are "preceding" and "previous" interchangeable in the following sentences?

1. Similarly, the homeownership rate for millennials is 8% lower than it was for the preceding two generations.
2. Millennials are, on average, better educated than previous generations – nearly 40% in the US have a bachelor’s degree compared to only a quarter of baby boomers.
(The tyranny of life milestones by Sara Harrison)

 

[probus]

They seem synonymous and interchangeable to me. Stylistically I like the choice the author made between them, but that is a matter of personal taste.

 

[jutfrank]

If you substitute one word for another, you will always effect some kind of change, in which sense no two words are ever interchangeable. Many learners have what is in my opinion a misguided approach to learning vocabulary. Instead of focusing on cases where interchanging two words or two grammatical forms yields seemingly synonymous sentences, you should focus on discriminating the differences of use and meaning, with a view to finding which word is the more appropriate in a particular context.

Sentence 1 is taken from a written text which aims to translate information from numeric/diagrammatic form into textual form (for example, an IELTS Writing Task 1). The writer is considering the order of generations laid out on a kind of 'mental timeline', with millennials appearing to the right of the other two generations. This could well in fact be how the information is represented in whatever diagram the speaker is looking at. With this view, preceding is the most appropriate word to use.

Sentence 2 is different. The writer is thinking about the generations as coming temporally prior to the moment of speaking. I think that very generally speaking, previous is better suited to express temporal (time) relations than spatial (space) relations, as well as being more appropriate to informal registers, such as those of spoken English, than preceding.