PREPOSITION PATROL

I was going to write about using a 27 chapter outline to plot your work for this post, but will leave that for another time.

Once we’ve completed our draft MS it needs to be edited on several different levels. Spelling, punctuation and grammar obviously come top of the list but there are other things that need to be considered. Overuse of prepositions is one of them.

For the past few days I’ve been on ‘preposition patrol.’ This entailed going through my work and highlighting every preposition I’d used to see which could be culled. Words like up and down are the obvious ones and it’s amazing how often they appear. Sometimes the use of these words is valid but quite often they can be cut out.

Recognising a verb or a noun when you see it is fairly obvious. But, instantly recognising that a word like despite is a preposition eludes most people. A word like but can also be off putting as it is usually thought of as a conjunction. So too with the word like, which can also be a noun, an adjective, an adverb or even a conjunction depending on how it is being used. Making a list can help and after a few pages highlighting these words you won’t even look at it.

Words to look out for when you go on preposition patrol are: about, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, but, by, despite, down, during, except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off, on, onto, outside, over, past, since, through, throughout, till, to, toward, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, without.

Analysing what you have written on a sentence level like this can even highlight things you’re not even looking for. It might be something as simple as a word choice you’ve made or even how you’ve phrased a complete sentence.