In case you weren't aware, we took a grammar vacation last week. I was more interested in developing my golf skills...and I sure wasn't concerned about perfect grammar while working on my drive. In fact, I remember making a lot of utterances that wouldn't even qualify as words! But, as far as I can tell, that's completely acceptable at the driving range. ;)
This week's grammar rule is about ending a sentence with a preposition, the words that create a relationship between other words and often deal with space and time, for example: above, by, around, before. According to Grammar Girl, "nearly all grammarians agree that it's fine to end sentences with prepositions, at least in some cases."
Here are two examples of sentences that can end with a preposition (taken from Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips):
1. I hope he cheers up. The sentence doesn't have the same meaning if you leave off the preposition ("I hope he cheers.").
2. What did you step on? Again, the sentence wouldn't make sense if you left off the preposition ("What did you step?"). Hard-core grammarians would counter with the correct sentence structure being "On what did you step?" Grammar Girl claims that nobody in their right mind talks that way...which might explain why I've had that as a secret goal for quite some time.
There are times, though, when it is clearly wrong to end sentences with a preposition. Grammar Girl's general rule is: "When you could leave off the preposition and it wouldn't change the meaning, you should leave it off." Here is her example:
Where is she at? Are you cringing? "Where is she?" means the same thing and sounds so much better!
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