Writing Exercise Three

(Moving Prepositions)

Write two paragraphs about your trip from home to school, a re-write of Narrative Two, in which you move the prepositions from the form S-V-O / PP to PP / S-V-O, or to some other form. You do not have to move every prepositional phrase (PP), just one or two will be enough to give your paragraph some variety, especially variety that makes sense.

EX: I walked down the sidewalk.

Changed to: Down the sidewalk I walked.

Now that you have written this, perhaps you can add another PP:

EX: Down the sidewalk I walked with my load of textbooks.

This example has two added prepositional phrases. But that is the way it is with prepositions. They quickly attach themselves to nouns and verbs because most nouns and verbs (such as "load" and "walked") need more information given about them for the reader to understand what is happening. Note in the example above that the prepositional "down the sidewalk" acts like an adverb explaining more about how "I walked," and "of textbooks" is an adjective that tells more about the noun "load." What about "with my load"?

Look again at the sentence above. Perhaps you don't like the proximity of the two walks"— walked" and sidewalk." Why wouldn't you like that? Perhaps you do. If you do, leave the sentence alone. If not, do something about it. What do you do? Prepositional phrases can usually be moved around just like nouns and adverbs can be moved.

EX: With my load of textbooks, I walked down the sidewalk.

NOTE: Don't confuse prepositions with particles. When we say, "I turned off the car," we are not using a prepositional phrase even though sometimes the word "off" is used as a preposition. We can also say, "I turned the car off." If you can move this word "off" around and still have the sentence make sense, then you are dealing with particles. We can say, "I jumped off the table," but not "I jumped the table off." This "off," therefore, acts like a preposition. Prepositional phrases can be moved to other places in the sentence, but the prepositions can't be moved to other positions without the whole phrase.

S V PP can be transformed to PP S V.

Ex: "I walked down the hall" can be turned to "Down the hall I walked."

By moving the PP to the beginning of the sentence, you gain some emphasis. The beginning of the sentence is almost always the most emphatic part of the sentence. When you write "I walked down the hall," the emphasis is on you, the subject of the action. When you write "Down the hall I walked," the emphasis has now shifted to the act of walking "down the hall" instead of walking some other place. You would never move ALL of the prepositional phrases. You only make changes in the basic sentence structure to get a desired effect.

Meta-Narrative Three: Write a paragraph describing how you feel about the differences between Narrative Two and Narrative Three.
  • Do the changes seem to add or subtract from what you want to express about your trip?
  • Do any of the changes seem awkward, too unrelated to how you speak? Is that bad? If some of the changes do seem too little like how you speak, then you have to decide whether or not you want to change them. Why does writing have to sound like speaking when it is not speech but writing?
  • Does writing have to correspond to speaking? In what ways does it? In what ways does it not? When we write something we also speak it to ourselves, but there is no one other than ourselves listening. Imagining another person who will "listen" to what we write (a reader, not a real listener) is imagining an audience. Successful writers imagine responsive audiences!
  • Use complete sentences not "hanging quotes" that are not attached to your own words so that the result is a grammatical sentence.

As always, when you write your meta-narrative be specific about both your feelings and the differences that you cite as important. Imagine that the audience for your meta-narrative knows nothing about your narrative except what you write about it in your meta-narrative. Your explanation must be clear enough, specific enough, have examples that explain enough, so that it makes sense without requiring the reader to go back and read your narrative.

IMPORTANT: Use quotations from your story to explain what you mean in your meta-narratives.

Writing Exercise Three: Student Example

I borrowed my parents' car. I left my house early. I could see my breath out in front of me; the temperature was so cold. At McDonald's for breakfast I stopped. The nice hot coffee and biscuit was just what I needed to warm me up. I noticed my gas hand was registering empty as I was leaving the restaurant, so I pulled into the first available gas station and pumped gas. In a matter of minutes I was again heading toward school. Knowing I would have to park at the bottom of the hill, I arrived at A.C.C. in plenty of time. I approached the entrance. As I opened the doors, the warm air hit me like a blast in the face. To class I walked, excited, looking forward to what lay ahead.

Meta-Narrative #3

In some sentences switching the prepositional phrase to the front of the Subject-Verb-Object sentence felt awkward, yet in some sentences it helped to emphasize the action taken. For example, I changed "I walked to class excited, looking forward to what lay ahead." By placing the words "to class I walked" at the beginning, I am emphasizing where I am walking. This allows the reader to picture me hurrying to class not just strolling along somewhere.

Janetta D. Adams, English 101-22, Spring, 1993

NOTE: Look how Janetta explains the changes that she made in the new version of her story. Because she used a quoted example from her previous version, we can make perfectly good sense of her meta-narrative without having read the narrative she is quoting from. Notice also how she writes about the specific change she made by putting the word "excited" in the form of her new version.

Janetta wrote that she changed "I walked to class excited, looking forward to what lay ahead," and I think this is an excellent example of a student giving serious thought to sentence style.

(If you have forgotten the most common prepositions, check out the list.)

For an excellent example of how a student handled this assignment, see Rick Waddle's Writing Exercise Three

Go to Sample use of Moving Prepositions by the Edwin Way Teale

Go to Writing Exercise Four

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