By: Jane Sumerset
Submitted: 2010-01-02 17:16:35 | Word Count: 519
Prepositions, as we all know, are a one of the distinctive parts of speech. It is very helpful in linking the subject, either a noun or a pronoun, into other words in the sentence. This makes your statement clear and understandable.
In writing, prepositions really are useful however; a writer must know how to use them in a correct and proper way. These prepositions may be spelled with a minimum of two letters but then, they are a bit confusing when we use them in our sentences.
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That is why, a writer should have the knowledge on how these words are being used correctly. It is really common that prepositions are being place in the middle of our sentence together with the object in our sentence. Sometimes, these words are place at the beginning of our sentences. But, have you seen these prepositions that are place at the end of each sentence? I bet some of you are familiar with it.
However, not all writers know the correct way of placing prepositions at the end of the sentence. Your work will be a total mess if you don’t know how to set them correctly.
Back in grammar school, I always had a hard time using prepositions. For some reason, they ended up with a frequent red mark on the papers I put in. As such, prepositions became a special focus for me, one I paid unusual attention to, hoping to stop it from turning up as a common error in my work.
If, like me, you experience a hard time working with prepositions, this quick guide should help point you in the right direction.
Frequent Usage
Designed to describe the relationship between two parts of a sentence, prepositions are important components of the English language that can ruin an entire statement’s meaning when omitted. However, they are usually misused the other way around – employed even when they’re unnecessary. In the sentence “They walked out of the room,” for instance, the preposition “of” is completely unnecessary – the statement will stand on its own even without it.
Prepositions At The End Of The Sentence
Traditional grammar dictates that prepositions can never be used at the end of the sentence. In fact, that was probably one of my most common writing mistakes, still showing up in my writing every now and then (thank God for English writing software which manages to catch it). Of course, since I’m no longer writing for a grammar nazi as I used to back in school, I can relax on the rule a bit and get away with it.
As it turns out, using prepositions at the end of a sentence is not that frowned upon outside the strict confines of grammar class.
If a preposition at the end is necessary for a sentence to make sense (such as in “That’s the restaurant we ate in”), you have the choice of either keeping it (since removing it means you just ate the restaurant) or rewriting the sentence (as in “That’s the restaurant where we ate”), with both ways pretty much accepted.
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