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}}A {{tag|preposition}}. Once you’ve put one at the end of a sentence, it’s a habit you’ll never tire of. | }}A {{tag|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. | |||
We have a theory that | 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”; | |||
We have a theory that “of” prevalance is a good measure of how laboured a passage is. The higher your “[[of ratio]]”, the worse your writing will be. | |||
===Pompous possessives=== | ===Pompous possessives=== | ||