Grammar Scam: Ending Sentences with Prepositions

“Never end a sentence with a preposition!” —Eighth Grade English Teachers, Everywhere

It’s not hard to understand why grammar gets a bad rap. It’s all those pesky rules!

• Subject and verb must agree.

• Participles must not dangle.

• Ensure your pronoun matches its antecedent.
  

What’s an antecedent, anyway? Maybe we’ll cover that in the next blog.

Today, I’m here to lift an eighth-grade English class burden from your shoulders: It’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition.

If your grammar is rusty, here’s a quick reminder: prepositions are words that show how things relate to each other in direction, time, place, location, space, etc. It’s too bad you’re not here, because if you were I’d burst into my preposition song. Alas, we will have to settle for a list:

About, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, at…And about 150 more exciting, fun-filled prepositions.

Let’s take a look at an example. Adherence to the preposition rule would take:

Which book are you talking about?

to

About which book are you talking?

Awkward! But if you take joy in checking grammar boxes (and I do), rearranging that sentence shows you paid attention in class and know the rules. Too bad it’s all a ruse.

The “rule” against prepositions at the end of the sentence developed when a couple of poets in the seventeenth century decided that the English language construction should mirror Latin. Inexplicably and stubbornly, the idea has passed through the generations—I admit, I’ve admonished my own children for this grievous “error.”

In case you need receipts before you disregard your teacher’s advice, both Merriam-Webster and the venerated Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) agree that terminal prepositions (the technical term) are A-okay.

In its typically verbose and delightful write-up about terminal prepositions, CMOS says the rule is an “unnecessary and pedantic restriction” and an “ill-founded superstition based on a false analogy to Latin grammar.”

So here is your official permission to let prepositions take their rightful place at the end of the sentence. Just be careful not to take it too far. There will still never be a time when you should end a sentence with “at,” for example. If you ask, “Where my grammar lovers at?” I will rightfully (and smugly) correct it to “Where are my grammar lovers?”