Of

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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 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”.

Use “of prevalence” measure how laboured your writing is. The higher your “of ratio”, the worse 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.

Our favourite example is dear old Ken Adams’ A Manual Of Style For Contract Drafting which, despite being dedicated to style, has stubbornly mangled its own title, through four editions and fifteen years. As it is, it’s a bit Bob Cunis: Ken could have gone the whole hog, and called it “A Manual Of Style For The Drafting Of Contracts”, or embraced his inner rebel, and called it — I dunno, a “Contract Style Manual”?

Colour me crazy.

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