Of

A preposition. Once you’ve put one at the end of a sentence, it’s a habit you’ll never tire of.

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Of is a harmless little fellow, but it can be an indication of tortured writing.

See? I just tortured some writing, right there. To say “it can be an indication of tortured writing” is to take “it indicates tortured writing” and draw it across a rack, bludgeoning it with a new, blunt, colourless verb (“to be”), cruelly eviscerating the perfectly adequate verb that already was there (“indicates”), ghoulishly rearranging it as a noun (“indication”), and putting them in relation to each other with a new preposition: “of”

This is “nominalisation” (the only thing worse is adjectivisation: to take that same perfectly suitable verb and make it into an adjective: “it can be indicative of tortured writing”.)

In either case, “of” is the giveaway. Being a preposition, “of” puts two things in relation to each other, and so tends to favour basic vocabulary over interesting words that describe that relation. So: “piece of writing” over “poem”, “letter”, “extract”, or “passage”.

Being a dead giveaway for passive constructions — “in the event of harm to the interests of the client by the broker” rather than “if the broker harms the client’s interests” — and nominalisations — “I shall initiate the termination of the scheme”, rather than “I will terminate the scheme”, of prevalence neatly measures laboured. The higher your “of ratio”, the more tiring your writing will be.

Pompous possessives

“Of” is the pompous writer’s favourite possessive, because it makes something fun sound austere and sonorous. And it’s hard to screw up. Apostrophes — the grocers favourite means of indicating possession — terrify lawyers, who fear making the same mistake grocer’s do.

“Skywalker’s rise” doesn’t sound quite so momentous as “The Rise Of Skywalker”. “England’s Bank” sounds like some ghastly funding initiative for social housing, where “The Bank of England” sounds like the Grand Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

Nominalisation dead giveaway

Other mendacious uses of “of”: look out for the character string “...ion of”. This is a dead giveaway for a passive nominalisation. For example, "In the event of a determination of an Event of Default by the Non-affected Party..." — makes you weep, doesn’t it — can be less tiresomely (and ambiguously) rendered as “if the Non-affected Party determines there has been an Event of Default”

See also

• An object-oriented approach to plain English