How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013
When you catch a preposition, kill it
How to not write bad
Pardon me for paraphrasing the title of one of my books, which I stole from Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” Adjectives can indeed be a problem. They are the prime culprits of telling-not-showing, which I feel is the single biggest general prose misstep. They can be wordy and sleep inducing, especially when mashed together in pairs or triplets.
But in my experience, prepositions are worse. Prepositions, of course, are the part of speech indicating relationship: in, of, to, with, from, under, over, and so on. They are absolutely necessary, but they are inherently weak and often imprecise. Calling someone a person with plans or a man of his word leaves so much open to speculation! Moreover, after a certain point, prepositions turn a sentence into a drawn-out blah. They actually do bring a sort of rhythm with them, but it’s an unfortunate, numbing rhythm, the anapest. This is the duh-duh-DUM-duh-duh-DUM of limericks and “’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house.” Lastly, prepositions are also often the perpetrators of the sorts of ambiguities and confusion described previously in the book.
My general rule is to allow one preposition per sentence, or two at the most. Any more than that and you have to cast an extremely cold eye.
The problem is, prepositions flow so naturally out of one’s fingers! As proof that they happen to the best of us, I give you a sentence—part of a review of a reality show called Sweet Home Alabama—by Ginia Bellafante, a TV critic for the New York Times and one of the top writers at the paper. (I’ve underlined the prepositions.)
[Here Devin, a pretty, blond student in a cowboy hat at the University of Alabama, is made to select from 20 bachelors, 10 of them “country,” and the rest mostly from the Northeast or Los Angeles.]
How to fix? Well, of the six prepositions, the real culprits are the first two, in and at; they, and the unfortunate prepositional phrases they initiate, trail behind Devin like a pair of tired, shambling dogs. The last three are innocuous, though the repetition of from isn’t ideal. I’m also struck that the sentence is pretty long. So…
Devin, a pretty, blond University of Alabama student who is almost always seen in a cowboy hat, is made to select from 20 bachelors. Half are “country,” and half come from Los Angeles or the Northeast.
Better, right? A description of how often she is shown in a cowboy hat (which I admittedly made up) is funnier, more precise, and more vivid than the vague in. The transplanted U of Alabama reference illustrates the way you can often strengthen a sentence by rejiggering a prepositional phrase and putting it before the noun. Thus The owner of the shop becomes The shop’s owner or The shop owner; a guy with a bald head becomes a bald guy.
As I said, English is not German, where complex and endless adjectives can be constructed, so sometimes you have to figure out exactly how a string of prepositions can be condensed.
[I said hello to a friend with a T-shirt with a picture of Bart Simpson on the front.]
I said hello to a friend in a Bart Simpson T-shirt.