When meeting with a client, I often make a joke that if all my clients somehow hosted a party together, and at this party they decided to subject me to a "roast" (a good-natured insult session directed at me and meant to be funny), the first thing everyone might do is imitate me saying something like "stop using so many 'of constructions'!"
Well, they wouldn't be wrong! This is among my signature writing tips, particularly when I work with a client whose first language is Korean, Arabic, or any Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese are the most common Romance languages, and they share origins in Latin). These languages frequently construct phrases using the preposition "of" or something equivalent to it. Thus, when clients with these L1s (first languages) turn to English writing, they transfer these phrase constructions as well...and it doesn't always work. "What's wrong with of constructions?" you may ask. But first, you might also ask, "What is an of construction?" To put it simply, an of construction is any phrase that contains "___ of ___" or "___ of [the/a/insert another article here] ____." Such a construction is not inherently incorrect in English. It is a bit like salt on your food: sometimes you even want to add some or a phrase (like a particular recipe) specifically demands it. However, many writers will overuse the of construction to the point that the writing becomes difficult to understand, because of constructions place greater demands on the reader's working memory capacity by asking them to store more information in their head as they read the phrase. Just like when you use too much salt on your food, when you use too many of constructions, the phrase becomes difficult to digest! Even more problematic is the of chain; that is, two or more of constructions in a row. Here is such an of chain: "Garlic mustard is a member of the group of plants of the genus Alliaria." Now, even if you know exactly what garlic mustard is (it's an invasive plant in the United States), you may feel a little lost reading this phrase! It would be more concise to say "Garlic mustard is in the Alliaria plant genus" (and perhaps you could explain elsewhere exactly what a genus is). Here, I deleted all the ofs from the sentence, but you don't even need to delete them all. Just try to leave only one, at most, per sentence! Whenever you find that you've written an of construction and it's not part of an established "phrase chunk" in English (See what I did there? "Part of" is just such an established "phrase chunk" for which it's totally OK to keep that "of"!), see if you can take the word after the of and make it a possessive (or, in grammar-speak, genitive) instead. This is what I mean here: let's say you had written "the wings of the monarch butterfly" somewhere in your paper. If you take the noun after the of and make it possessive, then place it before the first noun, you would have "the monarch butterfly's wings." And that conveys the exact same meaning in fewer words! Now that I've said all this, I should clarify that you don't need to delete every single "of" from your paper every time, but trying to limit your of constructions will make your writing far clearer and more concise. In fact, when I am just beginning to work with a new client who appears to be overusing the of constructions, I will usually recommend that they try a specific exercise: write a paragraph in academic prose without using any of constructions! While this is not something you may ever have to do in your real-life papers, it's a great brain-stretching exercise that will help you write more clearly in the future. Did you try the exercise I just described? If so, let me know how it worked for you!
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