Why? What for? - Writelike

Okay, so at this point is “prepositional phrase” just a fancy way to say place or time?

No! Prepositional phrases can tell us about all sorts of relationships beyond place and time!

For example, on the previous page, we used the preposition for to talk about duration of a process: 'He terrorised the village for three years."

But we can use the same preposition to explain the relationship between actions, such as the reason for something happening.

For example, in this next snippet, what did Uncle Sam pay a hundred thousand dollars for?

Uncle Sam paid a hundred thousand dollars for every second we'll be here.

The Martian(2014)

Uncle Sam paid a hundred thousand dollars for six fluffy white goats.

Uncle Sam paid a hundred thousand dollars for his mistake.

Write your own variation, changing the reason.

Try the same mental exercise from the previous page: look at the prepositional phrases above and move them to different positions in the sentence. You might notice in this situation that the prepositional phrase moves more naturally. For example, it sounds completely fine at the start of the sentence.