Rephrasing has become a common practice for students and writers and there are a few things that made them question their rephrasing skills.
One of them is rephrasing a sentence ending in a preposition. Well, if you are reading this post then maybe you are also confused about how to rephrase sentences ending in a preposition, are you?
Many professional authors and writers are not happy with people writing sentences that end with a preposition and they say this is a grammatical mistake.
On the contrary, some writers also say that ending a sentence with a preposition is a grammatical mistake but there is no big deal about that.
From both points of view, one thing is pretty clear, sentences ending in a preposition are definitely considered grammatically ill.
When it comes to paraphrasing assignments students surely don’t want to submit them with grammatical mistakes therefore, it is important to learn how to rephrase a sentence ending in a preposition.
In this post, we will discuss automatic way to rephrase such sentences but, at the end of this post, you will also get to know how you can manually rephrase sentences ending in prepositions.
So, stick to reading!
Before getting straight to ‘How’ let’s learn about prepositions a little.
What are Prepositions?
We can define a preposition as a small and common word that shows time, direction, or location. Prepositions can also be a group of words that are used before nouns or pronouns.
Example:
‘For what reason did David come here?’ In this sentence ‘for’ is a preposition.
Some commonly used prepositions are: at, on, in, below, under, and besides.
Now, it will be easy for you all to find the sentences ending in prepositions so that you can rephrase them accurately following the given ways below.
An Automatic Way to Rephrase Sentences Ending in Prepositions
Automatic way refers to the use of technology, as we all know that in the world of today, we have online tools for almost every task, so let’s get into it.
Use a Sentence Rephraser
A sentence rephraser is a great solution to rephrase sentences ending in prepositions. With the AI rephrasing tool, you can rephrase multiple sentences that are ending in prepositions for free.
Manually rephrasing sentences means you have to follow all of the four ways we will discuss below and obviously it will take your time and energy.
So, if you don’t have the time or energy to manually rephrase sentences ending in prepositions for your assignments or blogs, you can go for a paraphrasing tool.
How to use a sentence rephraser?
There is no fuss about using the tool, all you have to do is follow a few steps:
- Go to the tool and pick one mode to rephrase.
- Select the language from the dropdown list.
Copy/paste or type the sentence that you want to rephrase in the tool.- Hit the ‘Paraphrase Now’ button.
Copy/paste or type the sentence that you want to rephrase in the tool.This is all you need to do. After hitting the button, wait for a few seconds to get your rephrased sentences.
Let’s run a sentence that ends in a preposition through a rephraser to see whether or not it fixes the sentence.
At the left box of the tool, we typed the sentence ‘What reason did David come here for?’ we know that it ends with a preposition ‘for’, and at the right box of the tool we have the rephrased version of the sentence.
The rephrased sentence end with an adverb ‘here’. It follows one of the rules of manual rephrasing that we discussed in the previous section.
So, why not give a sentence rephraser a try?
Ways: How to Manually Rephrase a Sentence Ending in a Preposition?
Sometimes, it is impossible to take assistance from a paraphrasing tool, so here are some manual ways to rephrase sentences.
1. Reduce Buried Verbs
When a noun formed from a verb is used in place of a verb it results in a buried verb, also known as a smothered verb.
Buried verbs usually end in ‘-tion,’ ‘-ity,’ ‘-ment,’ and ‘-sion.’ Also, buried verbs need additional words to complete the sense, usually prepositions.
Therefore, if you can identify buried verbs in sentences ending in prepositions, you can easily rephrase those sentences by reducing buried verbs.
Example:
‘In violation of’ can be reduced to ‘Violate.’
2. Replace Prepositions with Adverbs and Adjectives
Another way to rephrase sentences ending in prepositions is to replace prepositions with adverbs and adjectives though, it might dilute your writing.
The reason why we suggest replacing preposition phrases with adverbs is that whether it’s a verb, an adjective, or another adverb, an adverb can change it.
Example:
‘What are you sitting yesterday on?’ this sentence is ending with the preposition ‘on.’
We can rephrase it using an adverb, ‘On what are you sitting yesterday?’
3. Remove Unnecessary Prepositions
A prominent reason why sentences end in prepositions is that there are too many prepositions in a sentence and students don’t know if it is okay to remove some of them and even if it is then which prepositions should be removed.
If you learn to find unnecessary prepositions in a sentence then you can easily rephrase that sentence without ending it in a preposition.
Example:
‘Alicia doesn’t know where she is going to.’
In this sentence, there is an unnecessary preposition ‘to’, and if you take out the last preposition ‘to’ from the sentence there will be no effect on the sentence and its context still be the same.
Whenever you are paraphrasing a sentence ending in a preposition look at whether or not the last preposition is unnecessary and if the answer is ‘Yes’ take that out.
4. Remove Infinitives from Sentences
Infinitives are verbs constructed with ‘to + verb’ and sometimes infinitives become part of the verb and if you shorten the infinitives the sentence could end up with a preposition.
Example:
‘I wish I had someone to talk to.’ This sentence has infinitives ‘to talk’ and a preposition is attached so, it can be rephrased as ‘I wish I could talk to someone.’
These are the few ways that you can use to manually rephrase a sentence ending in a preposition. Let’s move towards an automatic solution.
Bottom Line
Sentences that end in prepositions are considered grammatically incorrect and rephrasing such sentences is no less than a challenge.
Students and writers both do not want to submit their work with grammatical mistakes just like the one we targeted in this post.
Therefore, we discussed how you can rephrase sentences that end with prepositions both manually and automatically.
Manon Hazell
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