Helen Sword

When you turn a verb into a noun by adding a suffix such as ment or tion (confine → confinement; reflect → reflection), you sap its core energy. Likewise, an abstract noun formed from an adjective (suspicious → suspiciousness) or a concrete noun (globe → globalisation) tends to lack substance and mass, like a marrowless bone. That’s why nouns created from other parts of speech, technically known as ‘nominalisations’, are colloquially called ‘zombie nouns’: they suck the lifeblood from potentially lively prose.16

Examples, analogies and metaphors ground abstract theories in the physical world

3.
Prepositional podge
Key principles in this chapter:

• Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. ‘in a letter to the author of a book about birds’) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.

• Vary your prepositions.

• As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.

3.
Prepositional podge
Key principles in this chapter:

• Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. ‘in a letter to the author of a book about birds’) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.

• Vary your prepositions.

• As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.

Try writing a preposition-free sentence, like the one you are reading right now, and you will feel handcuffed, shackled, frustrated. Why? Because prepositions expand the horizons of our sentences; they lasso new nouns and supply our verbs with directional thrust.

To avoid such strung-out syntax, many authors stick to the ‘dynamic dozen’ rule: avoid separating subject and verb by more than about twelve words, unless you have a very good reason for doing so.

leanness of style does not necessarily guarantee elegance and eloquence. Indeed, excessively economical prose may signal verbal anorexia.

Prepositions add motion and direction to otherwise static language; they position our nouns (a bug in the rug, a cat on the mat) and shift the meaning of our verbs (shut in, shut out, shut off, shut up).

Prepositions with pep
Choose a page or two of your own writing and highlight all the prepositions. Next, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you ever use more than three or four prepositional phrases in a row? (e.g. ‘a book of case studies about the efficacy of involving multiple stakeholders in discussions about health care’)

• Are your prepositions dynamic or static? That is, do they suggest action and motion (through, onto, from), or do they reinforce the status quo (in, of, by)?

• Do you vary your prepositions, or do you tend to use the same two or three over and over again?

Play around with ways of making your prose glide more smoothly. For example, what happens when you cut long strings of prepositions down to size, or when you replace static prepositions with dynamic ones, or when you ensure the word of occurs no more than two or three times in a single paragraph?