Can you end a sentence with a preposition?
Can you end a sentence with a preposition? That’s the question a client asked me this morning.
This client is a professional communicator who believes passionately in talking to people in a friendly, human way. However, she was coming under pressure from colleagues to enforce this rather stuffy old ‘rule’.
My immediate response to her question?
OFFS.
My more considered response?
The edict against terminal prepositions, like the ‘rule’ against split infinitives (don’t get me started) stems from 18th and 19th-century grammarians’ attempts to force the conventions of Latin grammar on English. However, it often feels more natural in English to put a preposition at the end of a sentence – we do it all the time in the spoken language.
For example, which sounds more natural to you:
To which college did he go?
Or
Which college did he go to?
The second of these sentences breaks the ‘rule’ on terminal prepositions, by placing the word to at the end of the sentence. But how many people would ever say To which college did he go? without feeling just a little bit pretentious?
So your view on this ‘rule’ will depend on whether:
a) you’re aiming for a conversational or a more literary tone
b) your approach to grammar is prescriptive (based on adhering to set rules, regardless of their origin) or descriptive (based on how people actually use their own language)
The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides an interesting account of the origins of the ‘rule’ against terminal prepositions here, concluding with the following advice:
“If you don’t like to end your sentences with prepositions, you don’t have to—just don’t say that it is a rule.”
I would refine that advice slightly to something more reader-focused. Namely, if your reader is likely to be a prescriptivist who would consider a terminal preposition inelegant, then avoid it.
But feel free to put the preposition wherever feels most natural if your reader is likely to either:
a) not care a jot, or
b) be a descriptivist who’d consider correction of this non-mistake as silly, uninformed and “an impertinence, up with which I will not put” (a quote often mistakenly attributed to Churchill).
Most educated grammarians tend to have a descriptivist bent, including Professor Mike McCarthy, a world authority on grammar and usage. To quote his book English Grammar:
“the hoary old myth [about terminal prepositions] persists to a surprising extent. Dig a deep hole and bury it.”
So if you want to impress an educated audience with your grammar nous, place your preposition wherever it sounds best.
