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I have a bad habit of leaving ending sentences with prepositions. I'm inclined to write:

Two communities I'm working to contribute to

Is there a phrasing, and possibly a grammatical rule, that could help me out of this formulation?

Note: I found this conversation helpful, though not applicable to this case.

Community
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mbb
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  • "Two communities I'm contributing to..." – Roger Dec 10 '14 at 21:18
  • @Roger that's an improvement, but still leaves the dangling preposition. Isn't that bad? – mbb Dec 10 '14 at 21:26
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    Not always. Sometimes, the reworking you have to do in order to avoid ending with a preposition makes the sentence even more unreadable. Example: "Two communities to which I am contributing". The rule about ending sentences with prepositions is a bit of a dinosaur and not something to be overly concerned with (or "with which to be overly concerned"?) – Roger Dec 10 '14 at 21:30
  • "Two communities I am funding..." – Oldcat Dec 10 '14 at 21:32
  • Dangling prepositions more accurately describes those that can be completely removed without changing the meaning of the sentence. "Where is the library at?", for instance, can be just "Where is the library?" – Roger Dec 10 '14 at 21:32
  • Great point @Roger. Feel free to make that an answer. – mbb Dec 10 '14 at 21:32
  • The repetition of *to* seems awkward to me. I'd prefer Two communities I'm working at contributing* to* (or perhaps *towards contributing*, depending how tentatively OP wishes to present his efforts thus far in that endeavour). – FumbleFingers Dec 10 '14 at 21:38
  • Then you could donate to three communities and avoid that. – Oldcat Dec 10 '14 at 21:44
  • That isn't a complete sentence, so it's hard to say how you might restructure for better sentence flow. – Hot Licks Dec 10 '14 at 22:39

3 Answers3

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The rule about ending sentences with prepositions is a bit of a dinosaur. It, along with the rule about not splitting infinitives, is an artifact left over from Latin, where such constructions are impossible.

Quite often, the reworking you have to do in order to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition makes the sentence even more unreadable. Example: "X and Y are two communities to which I am contributing" instead of "X and Y are two communities I am contributing to."

(The awkwardness of such constructions gives us the anecdote variously attributed to several people including the phrase, "This is the sort of thing up with which I shall not put.")

The ending prepositions you want to watch out for are the ones that can be completely removed without changing the meaning of the sentence. "Where is the library at?", for instance, can be just "Where is the library?"

Roger
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Inspired by Richard A. Lanham's Revising Prose mission to remove lard from the written word, I’ve found that you can often avoid the preposition-at-the-end problem by using active voice instead of passive voice.

“Two communities I am contributing to” or “Two communities to which I am contributing” can be refined and refocused to the simpler, more direct, and more efficient, “I contribute to two communities.”

Cary Millsap
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You could rephrase it as "I'm working to contribute to two communities."

Nicole
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