Prepositional phrases

More is not always better

Prepositions and prepositional phrases are enormously powerful and expressive, but as with everything in language, life, and writing, it's possible to overuse them or just plain use them badly.

Sometimes you read a piece of weak writing and think, "This part needs more detail," in which case you might want to expand that section with prepositional phrases.

Other times you can read weak writing and think, "This has way too many prepositional phrases, I can't follow the chain, none of these details matter or make sense, it needs to be cut down." 

Having just warned about the risks of overusing prepositional phrases, or using them badly, let's do it!

Let's return to chaining and nesting.

The ability of prepositional phrases to be chained and nested within each other means there are limitless possibilities, including possibilities to overwrite. So let's try it for ourselves!

Let's start with the fruit battery snippet, which at the moment has only one prepositional phrase telling us what the battery is made out of:

Let's add more details about where and when the action was taking place.

So far, so good. We've added a little extra context and where and when. But now, let's pump this snippet full of prepositions!

Wow! We've gone from 1 to 11 prepositional phrases, adding all sorts of details about when, where, how, why, and more...

Take note of the tricky bit of nesting inside the original out of lemons, nails, wires and pennies phrase—the highlighting is a bit awkward because there are 3 other phrases squeezed inside it. And one of those is actually nested inside one of the other nested phrases!

Here's what it looks like when we only highlight the top layer of prepositional phrases:

Now it's your turn. How many prepositions can you add to the snippet?

Start by adding a couple of simple details (like a time and a place). Then keep going.

Once you have a few phrases and chains, take a look inside the prepositional phrases and see if you can nest some details inside your phrases.

Don't worry too much about doing "good writing"—the point of this exercise is to play with prepositions and see how far we can push them.

It's theoretically possible to continue adding prepositions all the way to infinity, but maybe you noticed that the more prepositions you added, the harder it got to follow what was going on. It's a balancing act between detail and readability.