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2. Watch for prepositional phrases

A preposition is a part of speech defined as “a word or group of words that is used with a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, location, or time, or to introduce an object.”† That’s a pretty vague definition, and it isn’t terrifically helpful on its own. But remembering the definition of prepositions is not as important as your ability to spot them and understand what they do.

Prepositions are those words like “in,” “on,” “of,” “into,” “by,” “under,” “with,” “around,” “about,” and “between” that serve as connectors in a sentence. You’ll find a long list of common prepositions in Appendix B. They introduce prepositional phrases. A prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and has a noun or a pronoun as the object of the preposition. Like so:

about the customer in the office on the phone by my authority under these circumstances of the organization

Like the passive voice, prepositional phrases are perfectly correct grammatical forms. It would be hard to write in English without using them. The problem comes when they’re overused. When writers try to sound “official,” they often fall into the trap of piling up prepositional phrases one after the other. Policy statements and anything else trying to sound legal often feature lots of prepositional phrases strung together. Learning to identify prepositions and the phrases that follow them is an important skill in making your writing more concise, so be on the lookout for phrases beginning with “of,” “by,” “in,” “for,” “about,” “with,” “through,” and other prepositions.

Let’s look at an example:

Participation in client negotiations with suppliers is prohibited by company policy unless (in very rare circumstances) there is advance consent of a leader of the gyro division in the client’s geography as well as an industry leader for the supplier’s industry.

Whoa. Most people can recognize this kind of writing as bad. It’s a little harder to identify exactly what’s wrong (it’s prepositional phrases and forms of the verb “to be”) and understand how to fix it. Let’s take this sentence apart. The prepositional phrases are in italics, and the “to be” forms are in bold:

Participation in client negotiations with suppliers is prohibited by company policy, unless (in very rare circumstances) there is advance consent of a leader of the gyro division in the client’s geography as well as an industry leader for the supplier’s industry.

That’s a lot of prepositional phrases all strung together. How do we fix it? The first step is to figure out what the message is and say it in plain English.

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