5 tactics to free your text of needless prepositional phrases

Little words and phrases can clog your writing.

A prepositional phrase, for example, is a series of words beginning with a preposition and providing additional information in a sentence that pertains to position (hence the word preposition) or relationship; the phrase “with a preposition” is itself a prepositional phrase.

Though such phrases are not inherently undesirable, they are often easily avoidable contributors to compositional clutter.

Here are five tactics for eliminating prepositional phrases by omission or alteration:

1. Use active voice. A prepositional phrase beginning with by often signals an opportunity to convert a passively constructed sentence into active voice (and render it more concise), as when, “The action was seen by observers as nothing more than a delaying tactic,” is revised to, “Observers saw the action as nothing more than a delaying tactic.”