Prepositional phrases begin with a preposition and end with an object. Some examples are:

     I left my book in the house.

     Her plane arrives before noon.

They are useful because they add information.

     Where did I leave the book? in the house

     When does her plane arrive? before noon

But sometimes they add nothing. Many just complicate sentences. For example, the previous sentence could have read, “Many of them just complicate sentences.” What does of them add? Nothing. The sentence is clear without that useless phrase.

Sometimes prepositional phrases make us sound silly.

     I was thinking in my head I should take a vacation.

Where else would we be thinking except in our head?

A string of prepositional phrases makes writing confusing.

     Smith backed the car into the garage at the corner next to the dog’s house beside the basketball court.

Writing like that takes the reader out of the story as he tries to figure out what happened.

We should eliminate as many prepositional phrases as possible to save words and to reduce ambiguity. There are two ways to cut them. The first is to outright kill them, as in the “I was thinking in my head” example. The second way is to rewrite, as in this example:

     All of that sounds good.

Instead, write:

     That all sounds good.

We saved one word. (Before you say, “Wow! One word! Let’s go celebrate!” think of it this way: we cut 20 percent of the sentence. More on that later.)

Now a more complicated example:

     Editor Bill Jones was intrigued by the resumé of the candidate.

Let’s tighten and improve the sentence by rewriting it to kill the prepositional phrase:

     The candidate’s resume intrigued editor Bill Jones.

This time we saved four words. (And not incidentally, changed passive voice to active and eliminated the weak verb was.)

Try it yourself. Can you remove the prepositional phrases in the two paragraphs below without changing meaning?

     Copyeditors remove excessive verbiage in stories.

     Hurricane Irma caused billions of dollars in damage. Many people were also killed in the storm.

Answers

We can certainly drop in stories because we know what copyeditors work on—stories.

     Copyeditors remove excessive verbiage.

In the Irma example, the sentences contain three prepositional phrases: of dollars, in damage, and in the storm. We can remove of dollars and in the storm without changing meaning.

     Hurricane Irma caused billions in damage. Many people were also killed.

We cut our original 16 words to 11.

(As an aside, also note we could change the passive voice “Many people were also killed” to active. “It also killed many people.”)

A caveat

Be careful when removing prepositional phrases. Sometimes they must remain for clarity. But many times you can eliminate them without changing meaning.

Scores of prepositions exist: Here is a partial list:

about, after, along, around, at, before, below, beside, between, during, for, from, in, inside, into, of, over, through, to, under

As a final step in my self-editing process I search for prepositions and kill all I can. It’s time consuming, but well worth the effort. I find that by rooting our excess prepositions I cut about 10 percent of words, or 100 out of every 1,000. The benefit is that now I have 100 more words to use for additional information.