The Write Blog

One of my new pet peeves is prepositional phrases that don’t logically link to the rest of the sentence. I see this writing practice all the time, and it usually happens because:

Faulty Linking

b) the writer is trying to cram extra information into a paragraph and can’t figure out where to put it.

Here’s an example: “With more than 7,000 members, our organization works with the trade industry to emphasize a seamless security-conscious environment.”

Ok, so on first glance it seems like a harmless enough sentence, but when you really start to look at it, we have two completely different unrelated pieces of information stuck together:

1) We have 7,000 members
2) Our organization works with the trade industry

The writer is simply trying to force these two items to be friends because he/she thought it sounded good.

The logical link between these two pieces of information simply isn’t there.

What we really mean is something like: “Leveraging input from over 7,000 members, our organization works directly with the trade industry to develop seamless security-conscious environments.”

Now we understand how the 7,000 members tie into developing the seamless security-concious environments.

Of course, the sentence is still a bit of a mouthful — that’s a lot of info for a reader to digest all at once. So, you’ll probably want to split it up. You could try…

“Our organization works directly with the trade industry. We leverage input from over 7,000 members to develop seamless security-conscious environments.”

Ahh…much easier to read!

Have a writing pet peeve? Let us know about it here!