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What Is a Preposition?

Though it may not be a popular title, it sure is a useful one.  I wish I’d had a copy handy when I was a first-year teacher, trying to teach prepositional phrases from a grammar text book that didn’t define what a preposition was — only gave a list of them.  This book begins by offering a clear definition of what a prepositions does (“It ties words together to show how they are related”), and then goes on to give several different examples, well-organized by the type of relationship they describe, and well-illustrated by large color photos.  Old-school grammarians may take objection to the blatant dismissal of the old rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, as this volume declares that a preposition “may be the first word, the last word, or somewhere in between.”