April 2020: Prepositions

Oh, those pesky prepositions. Preposition errors often follow multilingual writers long after they become fluent in English. A preposition is a word or a group of words used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, time, place, location, and special relationships. Some examples of prepositions are words like in, at, on, of, and to. There are some rules for usage, but much preposition usage is dictated by fixed expressions. In these cases, it is best to memorize the phrase instead of the individual preposition.

To find which preposition(s) follow(s) the verb or an adjective, look the verb or adjective up in an online dictionary, such as Merriam Webster, or use a corpus, such as The Corpus of Contemporary American English.

For other resources,

• See the webpage on prepositions.
• See the SMRTguide on Using a Corpus to Revise for Grammar and Scholarly Voice.

Revision Tip: Look back through your most recent draft of your capstone document and check for preposition usage in a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes running the document through Grammarly also helps identify errors. Also use the webpage on prepositions and the SMRTguide on Using a Corpus to Revise for Grammar and Scholarly Voice, linked above. Make revisions to your writing as needed for correct preposition usage.