Friday, July 9, 2010

To End With a Preposition or Not



Most grammarians nowadays seem to agree that it is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition, if you have to.  There are just so many expressions (like “have to”) that we use in English, it would be awkward always to avoid putting them at the end of a phrase.  There are usually ways to rewrite or restate a sentence, but it’s not necessary to knock yourself out for informal situations.

However, what I would like to address is going out of your way to end your phrase with a preposition, when there is a much better place to put it: close to the verb.  For example:

Put your chairs up.

Put up your chairs.

Why separate the put and the up?  The preposition in this case tells you exactly where your action is going, so why wait until after saying what the object is to add that information?

Take the trash out.

Take out the trash.

I think some people might say it the first way just to put extra emphasis on where the trash should go (especially if you’ve had to ask your teenager three or four times to do this).  But, I suspect it would be just as effective to put all the weight on the first two words together, unless you think he might mistakenly take in the trash.  [I think it’s actually harder to say it the first way because you’re waiting until the end of the sentence to lift your vocal inflection (like the French), and you tend to run out of air.]

This is different from using a whole prepositional phrase.  You would say, “Put your homework in the basket,” not “Put in the basket your homework.”  I’m not trying to make you crazy!

So, that’s really all I had to say about that.  I advocate folks thinking about their word choice and placement.  I try to say “with whom” or “with which,” rather than putting a dangling “with” at the end of a phrase, but sometimes it can’t be helped.  All I ask is that you try to be aware of what you’re saying (or writing) and see if there isn’t a better way, especially one that keeps prepositions close to the words they’re modifying.

By the way, it’s only a matter of time before I make some grammatical error myself in these posts (I’ve found a few while proofreading), so go easy on the gloating if you catch me!


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