How to Arrange Prepositional Phrases

How to Arrange Prepositional Phrases Prepositional phrases act like adjectives and adverbs to add meaning to nouns and verbs. They can also be arranged to be more effective, or condensed or eliminated to cut the clutter. Heres how: Arranging Prepositional Phrases A prepositional phrase often appears after the word it modifies: A spaceship from Venus landed in my back yard. However, like adverbs, prepositional phrases that modify verbs can also be found at the very beginning or very end of a sentence: In the morning, the Venusians mowed my lawn.The Venusians mowed my lawn in the morning. In both versions, the prepositional phrase in the morning modifies the verb mowed. Rearranging Prepositional Phrases Not all phrases are this flexible, and so we need to be careful not to confuse our readers by misplacing a prepositional phrase: The Venusians swam for two hours after lunch in my pool. This arrangement gives the idea that the visitors from Venus enjoyed lunch in the pool. If this is not the case, try moving one of the phrases: After lunch, the Venusians swam for two hours in my pool. The best arrangement is one thats both clear and uncluttered. Unpacking Prepositional Phrases Although several prepositional phrases may appear in the same sentence, avoid packing in so many phrases that you confuse the reader. The sentence below, for example, is cluttered and awkward: On a rickety stool in one corner of the crowded honky tonk, the folk singer sits playing lonesome songs on his battered old guitar about warm beer, cold women, and long nights on the road. In this case, the best way to break up the string of phrases is to make two sentences: On a rickety stool in one corner of the crowded honky tonk, the folk singer sits hunched over his battered old guitar. He plays lonesome songs about warm beer, cold women, and long nights on the road. Keep in mind that a  long sentence isnt necessarily an effective sentence. PRACTICE: Rearranging Prepositional PhrasesBreak up the long string of phrases in the sentence below by creating two sentences. Be sure to include all of the details contained in the original sentence. Up and down the coast the line of the forest is drawn sharp and clean in the brilliant colors of a wet blue morning in spring on the edge of a seascape of surf and sky and rocks. Eliminating Needless Modifiers We can improve our writing by using adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases that add to the meaning of sentences. We can also improve our writing by eliminating modifiers that add nothing to the meaning. A good writer doesnt waste words, so lets cut the clutter. The following sentence is wordy because some of the modifiers are repetitious or insignificant: Wordy: The steward was really a very friendly and agreeable man, quite round, rotund, and sleek, with a very costly set of dimples around his terribly pleasant smile. We can make this sentence more concise (and thus more effective) by cutting out the repetitious and overworked modifiers: Revised: The steward was an agreeable man, rotund, and sleek, with a costly set of dimples around his smile.(Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons) PRACTICE: Cutting the ClutterMake this sentence more concise by eliminating needless modifiers: It was a rainy morning, dull, wet, and gray, in the early part of the month of December. Common Prepositions about behind except outside above below for over across beneath from past after beside in through against between inside to along beyond into under among by near until around despite of up at down off with before during on without

When bullet points are a bad choice

When bullet points are a bad choice Why bullets wont make your case Bullets are designed to call out key points and help the reader scan large amounts of information. Or at least, thats the idea. You can start out with good intentions when you use them – youre probably trying to make life easier for your readers. Perhaps youre trying to create a document thats snappy, easy to understand, and that looks clean and modern. Unfortunately, in practice, bullet points can do the exact opposite. Endless bullets can be tedious to read. Theyve been around since the 80s, so they no longer automatically make a document look particularly modern. And when theyre used in the wrong context, theyre anything but easy to understand. One way that using bullets can badly misfire is when the author uses them to present an argument. A bullet list does not an argument make The theory: When you have a complex argument or analysis to explain, bullet points are a great idea. By breaking your argument into separate bullet points, you can make it easy to understand. Your reader just takes in each idea, one by one. The reality: This often doesnt work, largely because of what psychologists call the illusion of transparency. The illusion of transparency is the mistaken idea that whatever is going on in our own heads is obvious to other people. A classic demonstration of this is for one person to tap out a familiar tune (like Happy birthday or their national anthem) with their finger and then ask another person to guess the song. Try it for yourself. Think of a famous tune and tap it out to a friend or colleague. You will be amazed at how few people can correctly guess the song youre tapping out – experiments find that listeners guess correctly only around 3 per cent of the time. To you, it seems utterly obvious that youre tapping out a well-known tune. But the listener can only hear disconnected taps. Disconnected points Bullet points do exactly the same thing in writing. If you dont explicitly draw the connections between the ideas in your writing, you cant rely on your readers spotting the connections for themselves. The illusion of transparency reminds us that this is usually the case even when the connections between your bullet points are obvious to you. Of course, you can draw connections in ordinary running text. Our language is full of connective words that show the relationships between ideas. These include words like but, and, so, because, or, either and instead. But while you can (and probably naturally would) use words like these in regular structured prose to link your ideas, bullet points strip all of them away. And without them, you cant say – unequivocally – how ideas relate to each other. You cant talk about how or why a particular point is important – or not. And you cant expect your reader to fill in the blanks between your bullet points, as theyll often miss the links that seem obvious to you. Assemble the pieces You may have seen whole reports, proposals or emails that are little more than a list of bullets. The fact is, sometimes we might reach for bullet points as an alternative to fully planning out what it is were trying to say. It can be tempting, especially under time pressure, to try to skip over this part of the process and leave our reader to put the pieces together. But simply laying out a list of facts in bullet points does not by itself constitute a document, or an analysis, or a summary – its just a shortcut to nowhere. Documents like that never do your expertise and analysis justice, and theyre very unlikely to leave the reader informed, persuaded or happy. Instead, you need to make sure you do the work to assemble your argument first. If you start by being clear in your own mind what the connections are, you can then make these clear to your reader – and be sure theyll get your point. This post is taken from a larger lesson about the perils of misused bullet points (and better alternatives) in our online-learning programme, Emphasis 360. The programme is designed to transform your writing step by step in practical, bite-sized lessons. You can try it out for free here. Image credit: hin255 / Shutterstock