Every time I mention the no-sentence-final-prepositions rule as an example of unfounded prescriptivism, I always get a response from someone along the lines of “Oh, no prescriptivist actually believes that anymore.” I assure you some still do. Others have rejected the blanket prescription that all sentence-final prepositions are unacceptable, but they’ve replaced that idea with a strange half-prescription that only some final prepositions are okay. In either case, they’re still wrong.
Let’s review the basic history of the idea that you shouldn’t end clauses (especially complete sentences) with prepositions. The entire idea that there is something wrong with sentence-final prepositions was popularized by John Dryden back in the 17th century. Looking over a play by Ben Jonson from 1611 (around 60 years before Dryden was writing), Dryden remarked on Jonson’s line “The bodies that those souls were frighted from“, noting
“The Preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observ’d in my own writings.”
Dryden never saw fit to explain why this sentence-final preposition was a fault.* Before, during, and after the 17th century, sentence-final prepositions have been commonplace in speech and writing. No one’s ever really had a good explanation for why they’re opposed to them. The only reason you’d want to avoid clause-final prepositions is that they aren’t common in formal writing, and that’s the case largely because of the misguided prohibition against them.
But mistaken beliefs die the hardest, and so people still occasionally point out sentence-final prepositions to me as an obviously bad thing. It’s irritating enough when these are people who have no reason to know any better and are merely reciting out-of-date prescriptions. It’s much worse when it’s someone who clearly should know better out there advocating that there is a germ of truth in the preposition lie. For instance, I saw on Grammar Girl’s Top Ten Grammar Myths that she says it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition. But only sometimes:
“You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition when the sentence would mean the same thing if you left off the preposition. That means ‘Where are you at?’ is wrong because ‘Where are you?’ means the same thing. But there are many sentences where the final preposition is part of a phrasal verb or is necessary to keep from making stuffy, stilted sentences: ‘I’m going to throw up,’ ‘Let’s kiss and make up,’ and ‘What are you waiting for’ are just a few examples.”
So don’t allow a sentence-final preposition unless the revision is worse. But that advice only makes sense if there is something inherently wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. Note that (like Dryden) Grammar Girl does not address the issue of why sentence-final prepositions are ever bad, instead taking it as given. In fact, in a longer piece on sentence-final prepositions, she writes
“When you could leave off the preposition and it wouldn’t change the meaning, you should leave it off. Really, I can’t believe anyone would make such a silly mistake!”
Apparently it’s such a silly mistake that it need not be justified. But if sentence-final prepositions are so silly, then presumably you can only leave them in if the alternative is really awkward, even more awkward than the silly sentence-final prepositions would be.
If we look back at Grammar Girl’s acceptable final-preposition sentences — “I’m going to throw up,” “Let’s kiss and make up,” and “What are you waiting for?” — it’s trivial to make reasonable versions without the final prepositions: “I’m going to barf”, “Let’s kiss and reconcile,” “Why are you waiting?”. If you find sentence-final prepositions to be worth avoiding, I can’t see why you wouldn’t switch to these prepositionless alternatives. Unless, and I’m only going out on a limb here, your proscription is totally arbitrary.
You might argue, as I think Grammar Girl is doing, that there’s a difference in that the for in What are you waiting for? needs to be in the sentence as written, while the at in Where are you at? could be omitted. The latter sentence therefore goes against Strunk & White’s famous Omit Needless Words dictum. However, as many reasonable people have pointed out (look at this Jan Freeman column, for instance), Omit Needless Words is not a grammar rule of English, no matter how hard Strunk & White try to convince you otherwise. In fact, let me illustrate it with part of the first sentence of Grammar Girl’s own article:
” […] ending a sentence with a preposition is often unfairly labeled ‘undesirable grammar construction number one’ by people who were taught that prepositions have a proper place in the world […]”
All three of those bolded words could be removed without hurting the syntax of the sentence. That would leave us with the sentence “[it’s labelled undesirable by] people taught prepositions have a proper place in the world”, which is a real rubbish sentence. Sure, you could remove these words, but you’ll make the sentence hard to parse. If you want even stronger examples of Omit Needless Words taking you places you don’t want to go, consider these two famously incomprehensible psycholinguistic examples:
(1a) The horse raced past the barn fell.
(1b) The coach smiled at the player tossed the frisbee.
It is often good to avoid wordiness and rambling. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that. (I’m sure that, after getting this far into this post, you doubt I believe either of those statements.) But there is a difference between rambling and including a two-letter preposition of debatable necessity. You are not required to drop every word you can, nor are you supposed to. Merely being able to remove a word is not sufficient reason to do so.
Grammar Girl should know that, and at some unconscious level, she does. A reader pointed out that she herself said in one podcast “That’s where it’s at.” That’s standard in informal English, because you don’t end sentences with it’s**, and adding at suddenly makes the sentence valid again. But instead of noting this as evidence against the made-up preposition-proscription, she embarrassedly apologized for it. There’s no need to. You know it’s right, Grammar Girl! To thine own language be true.
Summary: There’s no reason to muck about with silly half-proscriptions. Clause- and sentence-final prepositions are always grammatical, although they can sound informal due to the 400 years of exile they’ve had to endure. Listen to your sentence and decide for yourself whether the final preposition sounds appropriate for the formality level you’re aiming at.
—
*: David Crystal, in The Fight for English, notes that Dryden was against ending sentences with “an adverb, a preposition, or any inconsiderable word” because this reduced their “strength”, but he gave no further reason, nor any reason specific to prepositions. And Dryden regularly broke this rule, ending sentences in his own grammar book with such inconsiderable words as it or him.
**: I was tempted to say you don’t end sentences with any contractions, but then I remembered the once-cool Jimmy Eat World song If You Don’t, Don’t. I think only not-contractions can end sentences, but I’m not willing to bet on it.
Motivated Grammar 
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September 2, 2010 at 12:31 pm
mike
I interpreted (still do, actually) the ban on “where … at” as a problem with redundancy, not with prepositions per se. My sense is that people who object to “where … at” think of it as uncultured rather than as a technical violation of a rule. I might be wrong.
FWIW, I find the objection to “where … at” unimpressive, not because of either of these reasons (dangling prep, too many words) but because the construction clearly represents a desire to express something that we have sort of lost in English, namely the distinction between whence (from), whither (to), and where (at), and that’s obviously still useful. (Auf Deutsch, “woher,” “wohin,” and just “wo.”)
As for the whole genesis of the proscription, I had always thought (based on half-remembered reading) that the argument was that a post-position PRE-position was a logical fallacy, therefore ipso facto “wrong,” QED, the end. There certainly was a period, not entirely over, where people dearly wanted grammatical logic to work as neatly as mathematical logic. Haha, too bad for them. :-)
September 2, 2010 at 12:46 pm
The Ridger
I think you can end with contracted auxiliaries, as in “if you haven’t read To Kill A Mockingbird by now, you should’ve” but I imagine that’s done far – FAR – more often in speech than writing.
September 2, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Vance
I agree with your second footnote, Gabe. I had a co-worker with good but not-quite-native English who would contract “I have” or “I will” even at the end of a sentence. In British English, of course, “I have” can be contracted even when “have” indicates possession — but not at the end of the sentence.
I remembered dimly that there’s a Gershwin lyric with a jokey sentence-final contraction — I had to hunt around a bit to remind myself that it’s “Biding My Time”: “’cause that’s the kind of guy I’m.”
September 2, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Vance
(Good example, Ridger, though I might tweak the tense slightly. “Did you read it? You should’ve.”)
September 2, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Daniel
Regarding Grammar Girl, she makes a couple of other dubious pronouncements in that list:
1. She says that “irregardless” is a bad word and a word you shouldn’t use, although she (probably grudgingly) admits that it is a word. Why is it a “bad” word? Why shouldn’t I use it?
2. She says that a passive voice is when you don’t name the person who is responsible for the actions. This is easily disproven by the sentence “This sentence was written by me”, which in clearly in passive voice and clearly indicates who was responsible for the action.
These, combined with the sentence-final preposition half-prescription Gabe mentions, means that if this was a test she’d only get a 70%. I suppose that’s a passing grade (barely) for a student, but she’s trying to be the teacher. Color me underwhelmed.
September 2, 2010 at 2:54 pm
Ray Girvan
A lot of people anyway don’t seem to grasp that “where are you at?” isn’t the same as “where are you?”, but has a distinct idiomatic meaning of “what is your current existential position / emotional state / stage in personal development?”.
September 2, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Vance
Ray, “where are you” can have that extended meaning as well, and “where are you at” can have the literal meaning. I think the point is not so much that the two forms have different meanings as that they belong to different dialects.
September 2, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Alex
“I think only not-contractions can end sentences, but I’m not willing to bet on it.”
Shall we think of more examples? Ok, let’s.
September 2, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Desi
I don’t think ending sentences with contractions is a problem at all. (“Ok, let’s” is a great example, as are “No, they aren’t” and “You really shouldn’t.”) My problem with “That’s where it’s” is that the contraction it’s place the emphasis on “it,” the subject, rather than “is,” the verb, and that sounds awkward, because you expect something to follow the it’s.
September 2, 2010 at 11:22 pm
John Kilgore
I think “where are you at?” is both clearly a colloquial usage (I can remember a grade school teacher disliking it) and ironically more exact than SE “Where are you?”, the supposedly correct alternative. If I’m not mistaken, colloquial speakers will use the Standard phrase to ask for general information — where in general are you these days? — but will add the preposition when they want to add urgency and specificity to the question: where exactly are you right this minute? The “at” is no idle mistake, but a functioning part of the phrase, bearing a meaningful distinction.
So as often happens, the non-standard usage is probably more expressive on its own turf. Still, I would probably need to circle the “at” if I came across it in a student paper, much as I would circle “ain’t” “whither,” or “he be in the house,” though all of these can make powerful claims of elegance and expressiveness. The problem is not that any of these usages is wrong in any absolute sense, but simply that they don’t fit the context (unless somehow they did, in which case my red pen would keep still).
BTW Gabe does a nice job of ending his post with a preposition that is perfectly graceful. QED!
September 3, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Emily Michelle
I was once told by someone or other that the rule about ending sentences with a preposition came into fashion because commentators were basing their observations off Latin, which doesn’t allow sentence-ending prepositions (in the same way that you mustn’t split an infinitive because it can’t be done in Latin). Was I misinformed? In retrospect, I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense.
Also, John Kilgore, you have inspired me to set a goal to work the phrase “he be in the house” into a paper.
September 3, 2010 at 4:32 pm
The Ridger
After some consideration, I think what’s really happening with “don’t end in contractions” is the rule is really “don’t end with with a contraction of the (first element of the) aux.
Should’ve – should is the first element, have the second
Let’s – us isn’t part of the verb phrase at all
Wouldn’t (etc) – not isn’t part of the aux
But I’m not sure of that. It could be wrong.
September 5, 2010 at 9:18 am
Indignant Desert Birds » Sunday Morning Reading Material (First Sunday in September)
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September 12, 2010 at 5:42 am
dale
With constructions like “make up” or “waiting for” (or “waiting on” if you’re from the South), aren’t we looking at verb phrases anyway and not prepositions at all? The Germans have a thing called a “separable prefix” that I’ve always assumed was related to the “up” or “for” in these cases.
September 12, 2010 at 5:49 pm
The Ridger
Indeed, these particles are akin to German’s separable prefixes – just permanently separated. Pronoun objects must precede them – that’s one way you can identify them. (Put it up, not put up it)
September 13, 2010 at 10:30 am
Best Proofreading Service
“Listen to your sentence and decide for yourself whether the final preposition sounds appropriate for the formality level you’re aiming at.” — Exactly. Simply listening to how the words sound is a major part of proofreading a sentence. If you’re a proofreader, your trained ear will tell you whether it’s right or wrong.
September 15, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Joseph Pendleton
This is a fairly simple issue of style guidelines being made into grammar rules. Ending sentences with prepositions or with contractions is not inherently ungrammatical and should not be made into a hard-and-fast grammar rule. But doing so is a style choice. Ending sentences with prepositions or contractions have the effect of creating a more colloquial tone than not doing so, and many authors or editors like to avoid such a tone in their writing or publications.
I actually agree with Grammar Girl’s approach and avoid ending sentences with prepositions when I can. Maybe this comes from my years of Latin in college or maybe it comes from a broken synapse in my frontal lobe, but ending a sentence in a preposition is just something I have decided not to do. But I do not agree with how she has cast a style choice as if it were a grammar rule. It just not a rule.
Gabe is correct in challenging her on the status of this of a rule, but he misses that she still has a point; it is a stylistic point, but still a point I think is useful.
October 14, 2010 at 9:02 am
Phillip Shaw
A working man–I sell used appliances for a living–I do not understand why I can read a sentence like this one…
**: I was tempted to say you don’t end sentences with any contractions, but then I remembered the once-cool Jimmy Eat World song If You Don’t, Don’t. I think only not-contractions can end sentences, but I’m not willing to bet on it.
…and then look two inches left and read the following, in the About the Blog section:
Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn’t.
You can hedge your bets all you want, but we know you’re hedging them, so why should anyone listen to you? Read your own sentences. Happy PhD, Mr Ivory-Tower-Slumming-It-As-Linguistic-Populist.
October 14, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Gabe
Hey all, thanks for the comments. When I posted this, I was smack in the middle of a big paper push, so I forgot to keep up with the comments. Hopefully at least some of you are still around.
mike: Your whence/whither/where point is compelling, and one I’m going to keep in mind in the future.
Ridger/Vance/Alex/Desi: I’m glad you’ve come up with some other sentence-final contractions. Ridger, I like the no-first-aux-contractions idea. Do you think that stress can be the determining factor? I ask because I am very bad at determining stress in English, but it seems to me that what’s wrong with a sentence like “I thought it wasn’t, but it’s” (for it is) is that is is supposed to be stressed, and the clitic ‘s can’t take that stress?
Daniel: I’m glad you weren’t blinded by the final-preposition stuff like I was. I’m a bit willing to tolerate the irregardless point, because I’m assuming she means something like “nonstandard” or “informal” and just doesn’t know to say that. But there’re few linguistic things that bug me more than misdefining the passive voice.
Ray Girvan/Vance/John Kilgore: Ray, you put that much better than I would’ve. For me, each form can have the literal or idiomatic meanings in different situations, but it’s really important to note the two meanings, because sometimes I manage to use the two forms to distinguish between the meanings.
Joseph Pendleton: I agree that there is a stylistic point against the final prepositions, but I hid my agreement in the summary and couched it in terms of informality. Ending a sentence with a preposition does indicate informality to many readers, and some might even find it wrong. But I weakly disagree that GG is making this point. The problem with her claim is that the anti-preposition readers are, in my experience, indifferent to the question of whether the preposition is easily moved. They just plain hate final prepositions. So if you did follow GG’s advice, even as mere stylistic opinion, you wouldn’t escape the ire of the prescriptivists. That’s why I thought her half-prescription was so silly. If you’re talking about the stylistic preference, go whole hog. If you’re talking about grammaticality, cut the prescription altogether.
Phillip Shaw: Our misunderstanding is the fault of my poor phrasing in the footnote. By “not-contractions” I didn’t mean “things that are not contractions” but rather “contractions containing a contracted form of not“. That’s why I mentioned “If you don’t, don’t”, which ends with a not-contraction and is grammatical. The “what isn’t” sentence is another example of this, as you’ve noted, and the commenters above noted that some other contractions can end sentences as well. Thank you, also, for the kind wishes at the end. I can only hope it is a happy PhD that I am given; a vicious or manic-depressive one would be the pits.
November 3, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Melody
Can you post the references you use for this article? I’m namely interested in the quote by John Dryden. (Or does this come from Crystal’s work?)
April 3, 2011 at 11:38 am
Phyllis Schoenberg
Brings to mind the (possibly apocryphal) Winston Churchill quote: “This is something up with which I shall not put.”
May 14, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Jenny
When I was studying linguistics, a career which ended before its time, I took a grammar class which was descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature. Anyway, it was the first time I had come across the descriptor of ‘particle’ as a part of “phrasal verb”. For those of you who haven’t heard of this, it’s basically when a word is actually an inextricable part of a verb phrase like ‘look for’ or ‘throw up’ or ‘take out’. These verbs mean something different than look, throw or take. Anyway, it was the first time I thought of the years of German that I took and connected that ‘look for’ is what we refer to in german as a ‘separable verb’. The only difference between a separable verb in German and in English is that the German infinitive looks like a single word, so it seems more so: ‘aufstehen’ instead of ‘to stand up’. In spanish these concepts are just single words that don’t even separate: ‘buscar’ is ‘to look for’. Anyway, to further the argument, they aren’t really prepositions (as such) at all. They just look like ’em. They’re actually verb particles.
September 20, 2012 at 9:06 am
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March 17, 2014 at 11:54 pm
Linguo
Sorry to be long winded, but please if you don’t mind read and consider the points I make, I welcome any rebuttal or criticism. Also, I wanted to get this out before I forgot, so keep in mind I haven’t read the article just yet, so if anything has already been addressed, I apologise for my ignorance of the fact. But I will get to the article as soon as I’m done with my reply.
First of all the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition is CORRECT, well mostly. If it goes before something, it’s a PREposition. However, if it ends a sentence or goes after something, it cannot be a preposition. If it goes after, it’s a POSTposition, like ago (We can never say it was four ago years or even it was ago four years, now can we?).
In English there are phrasal verbs which have mistakenly been accused of prepositional stranding and ending a sentence with a preposition, it’s wrong, these are particles, as Jenny mentioned.
We have three types of phrasal verbs: prepositional phrasal verbs, where they truly are composed of a verb and preposition, particle phrasal verbs, where there is no preposition, and prepositional particle verbs, which combine the two. I know this if from Wikipedia, but bare with me for a moment.
Verb + preposition (prepositional phrasal verbs)[4]
Who is looking after the kids? – after is a preposition that introduces the prepositional phrase after the kids.
Verb + particle (particle phrasal verbs)
They brought that up twice. – up is a particle, not a preposition.
Verb + particle + preposition (particle-prepositional phrasal verbs)
Who can put up with that?
If you’ll notice, the first and third examples cannot end a sentence with the preposition, the second one can end on the particle, because it’s part of the verb itself. Just try it. If you’re a native English speaker, or very advanced learner of English, then it should sound wrong to you.
Who is looking after?
What did they bring up?
Who can put up with?
But:
Who are y’all going out with?
Whose kids are you looking after?
Whose kids are you putting up with?
I would say that in these instances, these are not prepositions. I would say they are particles, that when followed, act as prepositions, and well they are pre-positional and become post-positional.
But not: They brought that up.
September 2, 2015 at 5:17 pm
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