Hopefully you realized something was very wrong with the above paragraph, but if you didn't, you may not be alone. This is becuase just about everyone ends their sentances with prepesitions, thus leaving the prepostions dangling helplessly. In fact, when people make sure thier prepositions are set firmly within the sentance, they may be called out as being pretenious or having odd speech. TV, Movies, Classrooms, and offices are riddled with people speaking and writing with dangling prepositions. Not ending your sentances with a prepostion is a grammar rule that seems to be falling by the waste side, and I'm not going to stand for it any more! I challenge each of you, along with myself, to be mindful of your preposition placement as you speak and write.
Below is a rewording of the paragraph above to make it correct and list of prepositions. Keeping your prepositions from dangling is as easy as rearanging a sentance and/or adding the word "which" after the preposition so it makes sense. Other times you'll find that the preposition was entirely unecessary or that your sentance is was pretty poor to begin with and you are better off to reword it entirely.
We all know that prepositions shouldn't dangle, but it is a difficult rule to follow. First of all, not every one knows their prepositions without looking them up in a book. And I, for one, do not carry around a grammar rule book in which to look. I often say something and realize afterwards that the preoposition is dangling. What I need is an easy cheat sheet at which I can look.
Prepositions:
about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, at
before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but (when it means except), by
concerning
down, during
except
for, from
in, into
like
of, off, on, over
past
since
through, throughout, to, toward(s)
under, underneath, unto, up, upon
with, within, without
This blog post brought to you by "Wordy Wednesdays"
4 comments:
I don't know about everyone else but I found the second paragraph to be odd and pretentious... for.
Winston Churchill is supposed to have told an editor who objected to WC's danglers, "This is errant nonsense up with which I will not put."
A man asks a Harvard student, "Where's the library at?" The student replies, "Here at Hah-Vahd we never end a sentence with a preposition." The man said, "Ok, where's the library at, asshole?"
And, of course, there is the brilliant Beavis and Butthead Do America moment in which a fed says, "The guy off in whose trailer they were jerking."
Yeah, the circumlocutions using "which" to force the preposition back into the middle of the sentance are pretty artificial.
In a related note, more authorities have accepted that under some circumstances split infinatives are acceptable. Which means, of course, that 'to brutally murder your mother' is now acceptable.
What sort of world do we live in?
My rule has always been to ask the question, "Am I understandable?" Most dangling prepositions are quite understandable provided you are not to inflexible with regard to where the object of the preposition is located. In the case of a dangling preposition the object is usually just previous to the preposition.
One other note, language developed quite fine without the aid of grammars (i.e. the books that try to codify what already exists). Truthfully, languages continue to develop quite fine even though the grammars exist. It's very much like music theory. Music theory is quite helpful, but you can make very moving music without knowing a bit of theory.
Do I think that schools should not use grammars. No, not at all...but I do think that folks get way more bothered by language that does not match the prescribed rules of the grammars than they ever should, especially when they did in fact understand what was being said.
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