Showing posts with label preposition usage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preposition usage. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Ineffectual phrases, repeater phrases, and other enemies of good writing

They may look so irresistibly apt and handy at first blush, but beware, many stock phrases in English can do more harm than good to your writing! I am referring to those common expressions that, rather than give finesse to your English, can make it sound fluffy, pretentious, or irritatingly redundant. They are (1) the so-called ineffectual phrases, (2) the many wordy phrases formed by habitual nominalization, (3) the repeater phrases, and (4) those mind-numbing verbose expressions that often infest journalistic reporting.

In “A sorry trail of wasted words,” a four-part series of essays that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2005, I discussed how these undesirable stock phrases can make English expositions an unpleasant reading or listening experience. I am posting the fourth essay here to give you a better idea why we need to banish these stock phrases from our written and spoken English. (June 18, 2011)     

A sorry trail of wasted words

Some stock phrases in English are inherently undesirable because they are too wordy and only tend to give a false depth and emphasis to what is being said. These expressions, which are called ineffectual phrases, don’t really add value to speech or writing; worse, they make their users sound fluffy or pretentious without meaning to. The best policy is therefore to avoid these phrases altogether and to routinely use their more concise equivalents.

Here are some of the most common of these ineffectual phrases, along with the more concise words for them: “as a matter of fact” (“actually”), “for the purpose of” (“for”), “in the near future” (“soon”), “in the event that” (“if”), “in the eventuality that” (“if”), “with the exception of” (“except”), “in conjunction with” (“and”), “due to the fact that” (“because”), “by virtue of the fact that” (“because”), “on account of the fact that” (“because”), “owing to the fact that” (“because”), “in view of the fact that” (“since,” “because”), “in the absence of” (“without”), “is (was) of the opinion that” (“thinks that,” “thought that”), “as regards” (“about”), “with regard to” (“about”), “with respect to” (“about”), “it is interesting to note that” (just drop it), “needless to say” (just drop it), and “when all is said and done” (just drop it).

Another pitfall we must guard against is getting into the habit of converting verbs into wordy phrases built around a nominalization, in the mistaken belief that this makes a statement look or sound more important and impressive. On the contrary, many phrases built around nominalizations not only make sentences longer and annoyingly obtuse but also obscure the idea being presented.

Here are some common wordy phrases that result from habitual nominalization, along with their simple verb equivalents: “take action on” (“act”), “give consideration to” (“consider”), “engage in the preparation of” (“prepare”), “conduct a discussion” (“discuss”), “make an assumption that” (“assume that”), “make a discovery of” (“discover”), “do (perform) an analysis of” (“analyze”), “result in a reduction” (“reduce”), and “reach a conclusion about” (“conclude”). When “–ion” words like these begin to mushroom in our writing or speech, it’s time to identify all of the needless nominalizations among them and make them revert to their active verb forms. In well-written prose, only a few truly useful nominalizations normally survive this denominalization process.

Wordiness also often results from habitual use of what are called repeater phrases. These are words commonly used together yet actually mean the same thing, forming tautologies. Of course, the problem can be remedied by simply dropping the extraneous words in the repeater phrase, but we need to cultivate a strong sensitivity to the repetition that often hides so well in such phrases.

Here are some common repeater phrases and their concise equivalents: “close proximity” (“close”), “new innovation” (“innovation”), “added bonus” (“bonus”), “exactly the same” (“the same”), “prior experience” (“experience”), “revert back” (“revert”), “minute detail” (“detail”), “close scrutiny” (“scrutiny”), “combine together” (“combine”), “surrounded on all sides” (“surrounded”), “free gift” (“gift”), “temporary reprieve” (“reprieve”), “exact replica” (“replica”), and “future plans” (“plans”).

Finally, we would all be spared from so much aggravation as readers and listeners if newspapers and the broadcast media only took a much more serious effort to rid their news and feature reportage of such numbing journalese as these: “placed under arrest” (“arrested”), “made good their escape” (“escaped”), “escaped injury” (“was not injured”), “kicked off the campaign” (“began the campaign”), “hammered out—or, worse, “forged”—an agreement” (“agreed”), “put in an appearance” (“appeared”), “razed to the ground” (“razed”), “last-ditch attempt” (“final attempt”), and “left in its wake a wide swath of destruction” (“caused so much destruction”). (November 7, 2005)
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 7, 2005 © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

My hunch was right about the usage of “between” and “among”

Are you sure that you have been correctly using the prepositions “between” and “among” in your sentence constructions all these years? If you can’t say for sure, then you’re not alone in your predicament. I was in the same situation once. Until my college days, in fact, I used to be totally confident in my choice between “between” and “among,” the following rule having been efficiently drilled into my head by my English grammar teachers: “Use ‘between’ for two, and use ‘among’ for more than two.”

But as I recounted in an essay I wrote several years ago for my English-usage column in The Manila Times, there finally came a time when I began to have my doubts. I wrote: “Using ‘between’ rarely gave me problems, but there were far too many situations when using ‘among’ for threesomes or more simply didn’t seem right. Sentences like the following particularly baffled me: ‘The chiffon cake was divided among Ana, Gloria, and Julia.’ ‘The stewardess had mud among her fingers.’ ‘The rich matron must have dropped her wallet somewhere among the supermarket, the street, and the parking lot.’ In all three cases, ‘among’ seemed to me a grammatical misfit and ‘between’ a more natural choice.” (Give Your English the Winning Edge, chapter 111, page 314) As it turned out, my hunch was correct.

In “Clarifying the use of ‘between’ and ‘among’,” a later essay that I have posted in this week’s edition of the Forum, I revisited this thorny aspect of English grammar after encountering what I thought was the mistaken use of “among” for “between” even by a professional linguist. As companion reading for this essay, I have provided a link to another essay on the same subject, “A recurrent misuse of ‘between’,” that I posted in the Forum last year. I hope that together, these two essays will give you much greater confidence in your usage choices between “between” and “among.”

[For inside the Forum]

Clarifying the use of “between” and “among”

The other day, I was reading The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark Baker, a linguistics professor at Rutgers University in the United States, when I came across this passage in his preface to the book: “Mohawk . . . is quite a different thing from Japanese or English or Welsh or Swahili or Navajo or Warlpiri or Hixkaryana. Nevertheless, linguists are discovering that the differences among [italics mine] these languages are created by a small number of discrete factors, called parameters.”

What struck me as rather odd—if not outright mistaken—is the author’s usage of the preposition “among” instead of “between” to relate the eight languages enumerated in the preceding sentence as part of a collectivity with certain differences. Over the years, on the authority of both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, I have always believed that the correct usage should be “between” when denoting a one-to-one relationship regardless of the number of items, in which case the sentence should read as follows: “Nevertheless, linguists are discovering that the differences between these languages are created by a small number of discrete factors, called parameters.”

Evidently, however, Prof. Baker subscribes to the popular notion that “between” should be limited to denoting a relationship involving only two entities, and that “among” should be used when there are more than two such entities. But as many an English user has wondered, is this grammar prescription really applicable in all cases?

When the relationship involves only two entities, of course, the only choice is “between,” as in these two sentences: “This arrangement is just between you and me.” “The meeting was meant to encourage discussion between the two warring clans.” But when more than two entities are involved, the choice between “between” and “among” gets fuzzy. When there are three warring clans, for instance, do we say, “The meeting was meant to encourage discussion between the warring Lopez, Marquez, and Enriquez clans” or “The meeting was meant to encourage discussion among the warring Lopez, Marquez, and Enriquez clans”?

According to Kenneth Wilson of The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, “between” can be used for as many items as desired if the relationship is one-to-one, as in the following sentence: “Trade relations between [not “among”] the United States, the Middle East, and China are bound to change due to the ongoing global economic crisis.” This usage prescription looks reasonable and logical to me, so I would suggest that the “between”-using version of the sentence about the three warring clans in the preceding paragraph is the correct one: “The meeting was meant to encourage discussion between the warring Lopez, Marquez, and Enriquez clans.”

My point in making this choice is to help people get rid of the profound tendency to limit the use of “between” to relationships involving only two entities and to use “among” for all relationships involving more than two entities. As Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary notes, “‘Between’ has been used of more than two since Old English; it is especially appropriate to denote a one-to-one relationship, regardless of the number of items. It can be used when the number is unspecified, as in “economic cooperation between nations,” and when more than two are enumerated, as in between you and me and the lamppost”; “partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia”—Nathaniel Benchley; and even when only one item is mentioned (but repetition is implied), as in “pausing between every sentence to rap the floor”—George Eliot.

“‘Among’ is more appropriate where the emphasis is on distribution rather than individual relationships, as in “discontent among the peasants.” When ‘among’ is automatically chosen for more than two, English idiom may be strained, as in “a worthy book that nevertheless falls among many stools”—John Simon; “the author alternates among modern slang, clichés and quotes from literary giants”—A. H. Johnston.

I hope that this clarifies the usage of “between” and “among” once and for all. (November 29, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 29, 2008 issue © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

COMPANION ESSAY:

Setting the limits of a range wrongly

There’s actually more to the problem than meets the eye in the frequent misuse of the preposition “between” in the sense of setting the limits or endpoints of a range, as in the sentences “Plain chocolate contains between 30 percent to 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carry between 1,000 to 1,800 items.”