Key principles in this chapter:
• Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. ‘in a letter to the author of a book about birds’) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.
• Vary your prepositions.
• As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.
Nouns and verbs form the building blocks of our sentences; but where would we be without prepositions? If we had none of those little linking words like in or on to help us position ourselves in the world, we would lose our sense of place. Try writing a preposition-free sentence, like the one you are reading right now, and you will feel handcuffed, shackled, frustrated. Why? Because prepositions expand the horizons of our sentences; they lasso new nouns and supply our verbs with directional thrust.
Too many prepositions, however, can slow a sentence down. Richard A. Lanham, author of a book called Editing Prose, observes that:
Two prepositional phrases in a row turn on a warning light, three make a problem, and four invite disaster … The of strings are the worst of all. They seem to reenact a series of hiccups.25
No wonder a phrase like
an abandonment of the contemporary vision of a community of practice grounded in the experience of teachers
leaves us feeling dazed and confused.
Have you ever read a sentence that consists of lots of little phrases arranged in a series of grammatical units in which the main ideas have been constructed from an assortment of prepositions paired with lots of different kinds of nouns? Or perhaps at some point you have lost your way in a meandering sentence that seemed to drag on and on, wending its way past one topic after another, toiling up high rhetorical slopes, plunging down into valleys of introspection, urging you along through a series of insights until at last you staggered over the finish line and out of the prepositional mire? If so, you know the overwhelming, sometimes stultifying effect of too many prepositions.
Let’s look more closely at the two long sentences in the preceding paragraph. In the first one, bland prepositions smother an already bland sentence, like a white sauce poured over baked cauliflower:
Have you ever read a paragraph that consists of lots of little phrases arranged in a series of grammatical units in which the main ideas have been constructed from an assortment of prepositions paired with lots of different kinds of nouns?
When static prepositions that take you nowhere new (of, in, from, with) link together bundles of abstract nouns (paragraph, phrases, series, units, assortment, prepositions, range, kinds, nouns), we end up with a lengthy, diffuse sentence that in fact has very little to say. Similar constructions abound in academic prose:
The use of cybernetics for this purpose is not obvious, because cybernetics – a science first developed in the 40s and 50s in the U.S. by Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann – implied to many critics in the socialist world an abandonment of the Marxist vision of a practice based in the experience of class struggle in favour of ‘system-neutral’, ‘value-free’ technocratic reason.26
Five repeated prepositions (of, for, in, by, to) allow the author of this sentence to cram in multiple abstract nouns (use, cybernetics, purpose, science, abandonment, vision, practice, experience, struggle, reason). Rather than helping us navigate, the excessive prepositions disorient us and bog us down.
Our second sample sentence, by contrast, shows how dynamic directional prepositions can propel a reader forward:
Or perhaps at some point you have lost your way in a sentence that seemed to drag on and on, wending its way past one topic after another, toiling up high rhetorical slopes, plunging down into valleys of introspection, urging you along through a series of insights until at last you staggered across the finish line and out of the prepositional mire?
With its cliché-studded spatial metaphor and over-the-top rhetoric, this sentence arguably bears us beyond the pale of good writing and into the realm of purple prose. Yet it does so with good humour, poking fun at meandering, mazy sentences just like itself. Note how the varied prepositions (at, in, on, past, after, up, down, into, of, along, through, until, across, out) collaborate with nouns, verbs and other parts of speech to supply the sentence’s energy: colourful -ing verbs (wending, toiling, plunging, urging) and other action verbs (lost, drag, staggered) anchor abstract ideas (topic, introspection, effort) in concrete imagery (slopes, valleys, eyes, brain, finish line, mire). We end up with a vivid mental image of a heroic reader conquering a marathon-length sentence.
In the hands of a self-conscious stylist, prepositions can draw out a moment of narrative suspense, mimic the stages of a journey or reinforce a sense of place. When poet Michele Leggott threads multiple prepositions through her architectural tour of ancient Babylon, she does so with a deft awareness of their rhapsodic, highly spatialised effect:
city of delights now I walk barefoot
on the glazed bricks of Babylon
through white daisies on high walls
among rippling yellow lions
in tanks of blue protective grace
to the catastrophe of Light beyond
the Ishtar Gate27
Elsewhere, when she wants to communicate a different kind of dislocation, Leggott uses no prepositions at all:
signature pink, leap
bodily the helix enough
doubled erotic or singing to
say I am energy make
certain my best feints dab
your ever, this is me28
These two examples show us how a confident writer’s diet can change radically from one repast to the next: muesli and yoghurt for breakfast, strawberries and champagne for lunch, fish and chips for dinner.
In academic writing, prepositions tend to become a problem only when authors jumble ideas and asides together a bit too enthusiastically, as in this example from a peer-reviewed literary studies journal:
A number of artists, most of them with French connections, but with little else in common than their deep involvement in visual interpretations of literary masterpieces, have provided new settings for, and found new meanings in, Gertrude Stein’s often hermetic texts.29
This serpentine sentence contains numerous prepositional phrases and other subordinate clauses, which in turn dilute the sentence’s energy by placing an excessive distance between its main noun and its verbs. Indeed, seven prepositions – of, of, with, with, in, in, of – intervene between the subject (‘a number’) and the first accompanying verb (‘have provided’). When stripped of its subordinate clauses, the passage reads much more clearly:
A number of artists have provided new settings for, and found new meanings in, Gertrude Stein’s often hermetic texts.
However, the revised version lacks the subtlety, detail and rhythmic flow of the original. The author probably needs to seek a middle ground between the two: a way of bringing the subject and verb closer together without abandoning breadth and nuance.
Some readers, especially those with a high level of intellectual stamina who have been trained in the consumption of syntactically complex academic prose, can stretch their attention span to accommodate, say, twenty or more words between subject and verb, as you have just managed to do with this sentence:
Some readers, especially those with a high level of intellectual stamina who have been trained in the consumption of syntactically complex academic prose, can stretch their attention span to accommodate, say, twenty or more words between subject and verb.
Few mortals, however, can cope with the grammatical intricacies of a sentence like this one from the scholarly journal Postmodern Culture:
The possibility that the ‘man’, whose being seems so self-evident and whose nature provides the object of modern knowledge and the human sciences, will one day be erased as a figure in thought is precisely what Foucault’s genealogy of the human sciences in The Order of Things sets out to entertain.30
No fewer than 31 words interpose between the sentence’s highly abstract subject (possibility) and its main verb (is). A concrete subject and an active verb would help invigorate this puffy prose. An even more serious problem, however, lies in the distance between noun and verb. To avoid such strung-out syntax, many authors stick to the ‘dynamic dozen’ rule: avoid separating subject and verb by more than about twelve words, unless you have a very good reason for doing so.
While experienced academics tend to pack on the prepositional podge, less confident writers may suffer from preposition deprivation. Consider this passage by a high school history student:
Many factors caused the United States to declare war upon Mexico. For example, the two nations spoke different languages and had different religions. The United States was full of energy and trying to expand. Mexico had little unity, was sparsely populated, and was weakened due to an oppressive upper class. The American mind was thinking about Manifest Destiny, and Mexico had control over Texas, California, and New Mexico.
The prose is lucid, concise, devoid of flab – and rather dull. Each sentence contains a subject, a verb, an object, one or two prepositional phrases and little else. Descriptive action verbs would help perk things up, as would some illustrative examples, some well-placed adjectives and, yes, a few more prepositional phrases. As we see from this example, leanness of style does not necessarily guarantee elegance and eloquence. Indeed, excessively economical prose may signal verbal anorexia.
Prepositions add motion and direction to otherwise static language; they position our nouns (a bug in the rug, a cat on the mat) and shift the meaning of our verbs (shut in, shut out, shut off, shut up). Imagine these famous titles without their prepositions: Back to the Future, From Russia with Love, On the Waterfront, Outside over There, Through the Looking-Glass, To the Lighthouse, Up the Down Staircase.
When advised by a conservative editor that he should avoid ending any sentence with a preposition, Winston Churchill reportedly retorted, ‘That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put!’ By mocking the editor’s edict through the very act of obeying it, Churchill affirmed the power of prepositions. Whether or not we put up with them, we cannot easily put them aside.
The following exercises will help you combat prepositional podge and strengthen links between nouns and verbs.
Choose a page or two of your own writing and highlight all the prepositions. Next, ask yourself the following questions:
• Do you ever use more than three or four prepositional phrases in a row? (e.g. ‘a book of case studies about the efficacy of involving multiple stakeholders in discussions about health care’)
• Are your prepositions dynamic or static? That is, do they suggest action and motion (through, onto, from), or do they reinforce the status quo (in, of, by)?
• Do you vary your prepositions, or do you tend to use the same two or three over and over again?
Play around with ways of making your prose glide more smoothly. For example, what happens when you cut long strings of prepositions down to size, or when you replace static prepositions with dynamic ones, or when you ensure the word of occurs no more than two or three times in a single paragraph?
Although nouns and verbs can communicate with each other across wide distances, they function most harmoniously at close range. Choose a paragraph or two of your writing and identify the subject of each sentence, along with its accompanying verb. Do you find any sentences in which the subject and verb are separated by more than about twelve words? If so, try rephrasing them so that noun and verb walk hand in hand.
Example: The nub of the issue, which philosophers in earlier centuries tended to dismiss as irrelevant, but which recent thinkers have come to regard as the centrepiece of our awareness of ourselves as human beings, depends on whether or not we are willing to accept a world without God.
The subject of the above sentence, nub, and the verb, depends, call out to each other across 32 intervening words. When we reunite subject and verb by breaking the sentence into three shorter ones (and chopping out a few prepositional phrases along the way), we end up with trimmer, cleaner prose:
The nub of the issue depends on our willingness to accept a world without God. In earlier centuries, philosophers tended to dismiss this issue as irrelevant. Recent thinkers, however, have come to regard it as the centrepiece of human self-awareness.
However, our revision exposes a crucial flaw in the original sentence: nub and depend do not in fact work well together. (Can a nub depend on something?) A meticulous author would rethink – and rewrite – the entire paragraph yet again.
The switch from the axis of presence and absence to the axis of pattern and randomness helps to explain one of the oddest dynamics in this odd poem: the recurrent whisking of characters through switchpoints between contexts. Such transfers occur in a spark or a flash: the glance exchanged by Helen and Achilles at Troy, the blast as Helen vanishes down a set of spiral stairs during the fall of Troy, the flash in the heavens on the beach in Egypt. In each of these moments, we are asked to imagine the transmission of patterns from one context to another.31
|
WritersDiet fitness ratings: |
|
|---|---|
|
verbs |
Lean |
|
nouns |
Fit & trim |
|
prepositions |
Heart attack |
|
adjectives/adverbs |
Lean |
|
it, this, that, there |
Lean |
|
Overall |
Flabby |
Comments: In this passage by literary critic Adalaide Morris, the multiple prepositions create a sense of displacement and link together concrete nouns – switchpoints, spark, flash, glance, Helen, Achilles, Troy, blast, stairs, flash, heavens, beach, Egypt – that embody the abstract themes of presence, absence, randomness and pattern. Because her prepositions serve a clear structural purpose, the author can safely ignore her ‘Heart attack’ rating in this category and leave the paragraph unchanged.