A Word, Please: Who do uninformed content providers answer to?

By June Casagrande

April 1, 2016 5:24 PM PT

We used to read articles. Now, more and more, we read content.

What’s the difference? An article represents an honest attempt to provide quality information gathered by a professional willing to put his name on it. Content is anything that will get your eyeballs on a business’ Web page.

No substance? No problem. The goal of content isn’t to provide good writing, decent editing or even factually correct information. It’s just to fill space with anything that might make you look. These pieces are often produced by “content farms,” whose sole purpose is to sell clusters of indiscriminately assembled words to businesses that need more stuff on their websites.

A bit of clickbait I found at Yourdictionary.com, a site where you can search the entries of several legitimate dictionaries, is a good lesson in the perils of content. “5 Grammar Errors That Will Tick Off Any Teacher” was the intriguing headline. I clicked on it.

Errors one through three were reasonable enough: misuse of apostrophes, wrong words, confusing “me” with “I.” Then I got to grammar error number four: “Ending a sentence with a preposition.”

“A common grammar debate is whether it is poor grammar to end a sentence with a preposition such as ‘with’ or ‘for.’ Current convention is that it is not correct to end a sentence with a preposition,” the unnamed author advised.

If it’s hard for readers to tell the difference between quality articles and mass-produced content, that’s by design. To compete with legitimate news sources for your attention, content producers try to sound like the real thing, even as they cut corners on time-consuming activities like research and fact-checking.

But this piece takes piffle peddling to a new low because many visitors to the site would logically assume that this advice was coming straight from the dictionary makers.

Not likely.

One of the dictionaries searchable at the site is American Heritage. If you look up the word “preposition” in that dictionary, you’ll find a usage note on this very question: “It was John Dryden who first promulgated the doctrine that a preposition may not be used at the end of a sentence, probably on the basis of a specious analogy to Latin,” the real dictionary explains. “English syntax does allow for final placement of the preposition, as in ‘We have much to be thankful for’ or ‘I asked her which course she had signed up for.’”

American Heritage isn’t alone. Every legitimate language authority agrees, from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage to the venerable “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White.

In fact, the only people who believe that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition are folks who stumbled across this popular myth and chose to believe it without ever looking it up — folks like the anonymous author of this content piece.

And here’s the kicker. The piece includes a link to a page where readers can learn more about the issue. The link leads to a section of Yourdictionary.com that explains that this “rule” was misapplied from Latin, concluding: “While many aspects of Latin have made their way into the English language, this particular grammar rule is not suited for modern English usage.”

Whoever wrote that steaming pile of content didn’t even bother to read the linked article.

For the record, you can end a sentence with “for,” “with,” “at,” “from,” “to” or any other preposition you like. If you think it sounds better to say “That’s the man I talked with” than “That’s the man with whom I talked,” there’s no rule against it.

There is only a myth, rooted in a false assumption and promulgated by the fact-checking-impaired, that you can easily disprove.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.