Painless Writing

Barron's Educational Series, Jeffrey Strausser

• Publisher: Barrons Educational Services
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781506268132
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Barron's makes writing fun and PAINLESS!

Painless Writing provides lighthearted, step-by-step learning and includes:

• Painless writing techniques with sample writing passages throughout
• Instruction on expressing your thoughts clearly, enlivening your writing with vivid images, and avoiding the dull, passive voice
• Painless tips, common pitfalls, instructive tables,“brain tickler” quizzes and answers throughout each chapter, and more.

Chapter 1

Clean Up Preposition Clutter

Preposition Overuse Ruins Your Style

Have you ever read something where the writer used too many words to describe what was happening or to describe something? Remember growing increasingly frustrated until you said, “Enough, already!” and started skimming, or, worse yet, you just quit reading?

Many times, writers using multi-word, vague prepositional phrases rather than one-word descriptive adjectives or prepositions cause wordy writing because they use many words when only a few are needed. Unfortunately, the problems do not stop there. Many students substitute prepositional phrases throughout their writing where verbs would have been the better choice. This writing fault leaves them with a passage that is wordy and dull. This wordiness and dullness causes readers to skim, and once they begin skimming, they are not going to fully appreciate the work that you put into your assignment.

Look at some of your writing. Be honest. Is it wordy... dull... hard to understand? Maybe you are writing with too many wordy and vague prepositional phrases. If you are, don’t worry! This common writing fault can be easily corrected. All you have to do is use the Painless Technique presented in this chapter and you will soon be eliminating unnecessary prepositional phrases.

PAINLESS TIP

Don’t overdo it!

Do not try to eliminate all prepositions from your writing because prepositions and prepositional phrases provide your reader with additional information about the nouns and verbs in the sentences you have written. The problem is that many writers overuse them because they think this is the only way to provide information. However, you will soon learn that is not the case. Overusing prepositions is a common fault, which, left unattended, develops into a bad habit that leads to wordy and dull writing. We certainly don’t want to do that! Therefore, eliminate all unnecessary prepositions and their accompanying wordy baggage.

The first Painless Technique will help you eliminate this dull baggage from your writing. Let’s start by stating this first technique.

PAINLESS TECHNIQUE #1Make your writing clearer and more interesting by eliminating unnecessary prepositional phrases.

Identifying Prepositions

Make sure you can identify prepositions and their phrases

A preposition is a word used to link a noun to a sentence and, in so doing, to relate the noun to either another noun or a verb. The English language contains many words that can function as prepositions. Below are words that commonly function as prepositions:

by	because	at
under	during	before
for	from	behind
near	like	beside
about	over	between
on	in	into
against	until	of
to	across	off
with	above	without
next	toward	such
inside	outside

A prepositional phrase consists of a preposition and a noun or a pronoun acting as the preposition’s object. Within this phrase, the preposition depicts a relationship to the noun. Some prepositional phrases are shown below.

on the beach	off the cuff
near the desk	after it
against the wind	across the continent
from the beginning	toward the end
under the table	with whom

Now that we can identify prepositions and their accompanying phrases, we should ask: how many prepositions are too many?

Unfortunately, there is no easy rule to tell you whether you have overloaded your writing with unnecessary prepositions. Nevertheless, you can learn to detect and solve the problem. If your sentences contain only a few verbs, especially verbs in the passive voice, and many prepositions, your report or essay is probably wordy and confusing. (In Chapter Three we talk more about what happens to your writing when you use the passive voice.) Alternatively, if you are a numbers type of person, here is a reasonable rule of thumb. If your writing contains 20 percent to 25 percent prepositions, you probably have used too many prepositions.

Too many prepositions

Unnecessary prepositions and their wordy baggage, as well as passive voice sentences, riddle the following writing excerpt. Notice how difficult it is to stay interested in this excerpt. Imagine several pages of this!

Exploring Mars

At this point in time, Mars is the target of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Because of its closeness to Earth, Mars is being studied by scientists for the purposes of a future mission. In a manner similar to the earlier study of the Moon by scientists, a probe is planned to be sent by NASA to within the immediate vicinity of the planet, with a view toward collecting data with respect to the atmosphere of the planet. NASA plans to send in excess of one dozen of these probes during the course of the next five years.

From the point of view of some nonscientists, the proposed expenditure of billions of dollars for the purpose of studying an inhospitable planet such as Mars appears to be a waste of money. In their opinion, at this point in time, our own country is in need of support in the financial area, particularly with regard to the improvement of the infrastructure.

At this point in time, from our point of view, by saying the choice in this matter is to either explore Mars and work on no other concerns does not properly frame the question under consideration. Our country is in control of vast financial resources. By virtue of this, in the event that our lawmakers can work together, they should be able to devise a budget during the course of each year that will take into consideration both our desire to explore Mars in relation to our need to update our country’s infrastructure.

This writing excerpt is an extreme example of preposition overuse. The following exercise will work on identifying prepositions and their accompanying prepositional phrases.

BRAIN TICKLE...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• How to Use This Book
• Chapter One: Clean Up Preposition Clutter
• Chapter Two: Spice Up Your Writing
• Chapter Three: Silence the Passive Voice
• Chapter Four: Reduce Nominalizations and Activate Your Writing
• Chapter Five: Smooth Out Your Writing
• Chapter Six: Harness the Power of the Comma
• Chapter Seven: Add Rhythm to Your Writing
• Chapter Eight: Gremlins in Your Writing
• Chapter Nine: The Framework for Success
• Appendix: Further Reading
• Index