Indecent prepositions
Somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind there’s probably an English teacher warning you not to end a sentence with a preposition. Although this and other outdated rules have fallen out of favor with modern communicators, they leave a vague feeling that we’re doing something to be ashamed of. (See what I did there?)
The contortions we go through in order to avoid ending sentences with prepositions are usually worse than just letting it happen. It’s reported that Winston Churchill once answered someone who scolded him for it, “Madam, that is one sort of criticism up with which I will not put.”
If you still cringe at breaking that ancient non-rule, here are some real examples and graceful ways to avoid the problem:
From company email about a conference:
At what time do you want to meet up at?
This writer started out with the awkward at what time construction, only to blow it by ending the sentence with at anyway.
Solution: Remove prepositions. All of them. What time do you want to meet?
From a published novel:
With whom did you go skydiving with?
Another case of forgetting (in the space of seven words) that the purpose of using with at the beginning was to avoid using it at the end.
Solution: You went skydiving? Holy cow! Who went with you? (The Holy cow! part is optional.)
From instructions on how to build web pages:
All child pages link to the page to which they’ve been made subpages of.
This writer could not decide whether the proper preposition was to or of, so he just used both for good measure.
Solution: Each child page links to its parent page.
My favorite story about sentence-ending prepositions goes like this:
A toddler went upstairs while his father selected a bedtime story to read to him. But the father chose a book with monsters in it, and the child didn’t like it. When daddy came into his room to tuck him in, the little boy said, “Oh no—what did you bring the book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?”
Five in a row. Top that!
Like TextCPR on Facebook!
