Day 115: Use adjectives instead of prepositional phrases for descriptions.

In writing that is artificially formal, such as in much academic writing and business writing, prepositional phrases are used to provide descriptions. Consider this sentence.

“His style of leadership was abusive.”

Here, the prepositional phrase “of leadership” is describing “style.” Grammatically, this sentence is fine. However, prepositional phrases tend to make writing lifeless and unnecessarily complex, i.e., not engaging and straightforward.

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We use this tip to remove the prepositional phrase and revise the sentence as follows.

“His leadership style was abusive.”

We could also revise the sentence to remove the weak verb “was.” This might give us the following sentence:

“He had an abusive leadership style.”

This revision is better because it replaces the weak verb “was” with the action verb “had.”

What did we do here? First, we revised the sentence to use an adjective instead of a prepositional phrase. Second, we revised the sentence to use an action verb instead of a to be verb. The result is vigorous, engaging writing.