Prepositions – a nightmare?

Proofreading your documents reveals to you that most of your errors are grammatical in nature. Grammatical errors include those which concern use of pronouns, tenses, irregular verbs, prepositions, articles, possessive case, speech ( especially indirect), singular/plural, adjectives, relative clauses etc.

Though it is true that copy-editing shows errors in all the parts of speech, those engaged in English check or proofreading may be able to confirm that many errors relate to only a few of them.

One of the problems which copy-editing experts may acknowledge relates to the use of prepositions.

Sometimes you find a noun being used as a preposition, as it happens with the word “inside” here; (1) many students went inside the church. (2) The devil painted the inside black.

Use of prepositions is not the same in all languages.

Some languages have no prepositions in certain contexts. In the sentence, “Honesty is the best policy”, the word “Honesty” doesn’t take a preposition. An English check will remove any preposition used here.

A sentence in a similar context in your mother tongue may need use of a preposition; when you translate this, you may get a sentence like, “When the evil comes...” Proofreading will throw out “the” before “evil”.

Go Back