Of

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The JC’s guide to writing nice.™


Would it have been as good if they called it Brian’s Life, though?
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A preposition. Once you’ve put one at the end of a sentence, it’s a habit you’ll never tire of.

“Of” is a harmless little fellow, but it is indicative of tortured writing.

It is indicative of tortured writing.

See? I just tortured some writing, right there. I took

It indicates tortured writing.

and drew it across a rack. I bludgeoned it with a colourless verb (“to be”), eviscerating the verb that already was there (“indicates”) by turning it into noun (“indication”), and I related these new components with a preposition: “of”.

Of” is the giveaway.

“Of prevalence” neatly measures laboured writing. Being a preposition, it puts things in relation to each other, and so tends to favour simple over interesting nouns to describe the relationship. So: “piece of writing” instead of “poem”, “letter”, “monograph”, or “diatribe”. It is also 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. Look out for the character string “...ion of”. This is a dead giveaway for a passive nominalisation.

I shall initiate the termination of the scheme...

rather than

I will terminate the scheme...

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 things 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.[1]

Now sometimes you want sonoreity:

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, whereas “The Bank of England” sounds like the Grand Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. Brian’s Life sounds like a column in Private Eye.

But beyond that, treat “of” as a prolixity count.

See also

References