Essay -- Prepositions: The Woe of the Non-Native Writer
Some problems are universal to all writers, regardless of background or accomplishment. As Daniel points out, even Woolf and Tolstoy suffered from writer's block. Unfortunately, some issues occur more frequently in the writings of certain types of authors. Ardent watchers of television might form brilliant arguments, without the slightest comprehension of paragraph structure or punctuation; speakers of certain dialects have trouble spelling words phonetically. These tendencies more often than not are easily mitigated by simply reading more. For non-native speakers of a language, however, certain problems seem to persist regardless of the volumes of literature consumed. For me and many other non-native speakers of English whose work I've reviewed, prepositions seem to be the most elusive part of speech. Getting those prepositions right generally takes a lot of conscious hard work. The University of Ottawa website provides us with a useful alphabetized list of prepositions: abou...