Winston Churchill, famous for his dogged resolve as Prime Minister of Britain during World War II, was once scolded by his secretary (or so the story goes) for ending a sentence with a preposition. His commanding reply was, That is something up with which I shall not put. The tale, tall or not, illustrates an …
Tag Archives: Prepositions
Look for Prepositional Phrases
In the first draft of a longish report, a student of mine recently wrote a sentence similar in structure to this one: He related to me that cooking was one of the greatest sources of his love of his family. My student wasn’t happy, I wasn’t happy, and so after analyzing the sentence together for …
Prepositions
Most of us are confident with the idea that nouns name things (tree, freedom) and verbs indicate an action (throw, walk) or a state of being (is, were). But what do prepositions do? Some say that prepositions (along with conjunctions, if truth be told) are the slipperiest of the eight parts of speech. They are …