Many years ago when I was still active in the lecture circuit for business writing, I teamed up with a graduate-school English professor to design a two-day English improvement seminar for a client company. We soon got into a very animated discussion on which should get priority in the refresher course—mastery of the conjunctions or mastery of the prepositions?
With too much ground to cover in less than 12 hours of course work, we needed to focus only on the most critical usage areas where the English of the participants could be demonstrably improved.
We agreed that greater mastery of both
the conjunctions and the prepositions—
connectives is the general term for them—is crucial to good English, but my lecture partner wanted to focus on the prepositions. He argued that their misuse was so rampant not only in journalism but also in business and commercial writing. It was a shame, he said, that far too many people are incorrectly using “at” instead of “on” or “in” as a preposition for specific points in time, “in” instead of “on” as a preposition of location, and “into” instead of “onto” as a preposition of motion and direction.
I agreed with him that while preposition misuse is indeed rampant, the problem couldn’t be solved by just 30 minutes of seminar instruction. A much better solution, I said, is sustained, conscientious self-study. What’s more, I argued, preposition usage is largely a matter of convention that can sometimes be arbitrary among some English users. For instance, I pointed out that British English often uses “in” and “on” in exactly the opposite way that American English does.
Then I called his attention to the even more complicated matter of the prepositional idioms and prepositional phrases—those quirky verb forms, adjective forms, and adverb forms that demand particular prepositions to work properly, as in “composed
of” instead of “composed
from” and “charge
with a crime” instead of “charge
of a crime.” These forms don’t really have an overt logic, I said; they simply become entrenched in the language through repeated use. And since there are hundreds of these prepositional forms, people obviously can’t learn them through quick bursts of instruction in a seminar environment. They need to be committed to memory over the long term.
I argued that in contrast, the conjunctions are something that people need to master right away so they can graduate from just constructing simple, one-idea sentences into more informative and expressive ones. They need the conjunctions to more effectively correlate and link sentences into a logical train of ideas, then to unify those ideas into coherent and understandable writing or speech.
People obviously can achieve this mastery only by becoming more conversant with the
conjunctions, specifically (1) the
coordinating conjunctions “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so”; (2) the whole range of
subordinating conjunctions such as “after” and “before,” “since” and “because,” and “though” and “even if”; (3) the
conditional subordinating conjunctions such as “if” and “while”; and (4) the
conjunctive adverbs such as “however” and “therefore.”
Conjunctions, I pointed out, are actually what drive the logic of sentences and provide coherence and unity to a particular set of ideas. Thus, we can bungle our sentences with several ill-chosen prepositions yet still get ourselves understood, but just one wrong conjunction can make our ideas go astray, demolish our line of argument, and confuse our readers or listeners. At worst, I said, wrong preposition choices can mark a person only as someone deficient in English grammar, but wrong conjunction choices can mark that person as a bad, illogical thinker, perhaps even a buffoon.
After our long discussion, I am glad to report, my fellow seminar developer agreed to drop preposition usage from the seminar and to give the slot to conjunction usage instead.
Next:
The coordinating conjunctions in review (April 13, 2017) NO ISSUE OF THE TIMES ON MAUNDY THURSDAY; RESCHEDULED FOR APRIL 20, 2017 This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Education Section of The Manila Times
, April 6, 2017 issue (print edition only), © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
