Woo Hoo! Busting a grammar myth!

This one is for Debbie Gartner  – and everyone else who has ever apologized for ending a sentence with a preposition.

It turns out…

The rule that says you mustn't end a sentence with a preposition tops the list of Grammar Girl's top ten grammar myths.

It is perfectly fine to end your sentence with a preposition, as long as the sentence needs it.

It's not fine when it's extraneous, as it "Where are you at?"

Think about it. If you took "to" away from the sentence "Who are you talking to?" it would sound dumb and make no sense at all. And if you wrote "To whom are you talking?" you'd sound like a pompous prune.

Can you imagine changing "What did you just step in?" to "In what did you just step?"

Take the sentence Debbie apologized for: " This is one pair I never had difficulty with." It would make no sense at all if you dropped "with," and it would sound really goofy if you wrote "With this pair I never had difficulty." And "This is one pair with which I have never had difficulty" sounds way too stuffy.

According to Grammar Girl, the driving point is that normal people simply don't talk that way.

So… why did your school teachers drill this into you? Because it was drilled into them, perhaps.

Grammar historians say this, along with the prohibition on beginning a sentence with a conjunction, came from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, when some notable writers tried to make English grammar conform to that of Latin.

According to OxfordDictionaries.com,"This prohibition was taken up by grammarians and teachers in the next two centuries and became very tenacious. English is not Latin, however, and contemporary authorities do not try to shoehorn it into the Latin model." 

Apparently it's also a myth that it was Benjamin Franklin who said "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put!" when he was making fun of someone who corrected him, but it's still funny.  

The bottom line – no apologies necessary for writing the way we speak.

Go ahead and end your sentences with prepositions, and when it fits, begin them with a conjunction (and or but). 

One Caution: If you're writing a job application or otherwise needing to impress someone who may not know that it's perfectly OK, avoid both of these non-errors. If they discount you for it, they'll be wrong, but you'll still get counted down.