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What is the difference between "leave X out" and "leave out X?" Assuming both are grammatically correct, is there any difference in the message conveyed between using one over the other? For instance, "she left Ryan out" vs. "she left out Ryan."

Felix Wood
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    Those sentences have the same meaning, but if X is a long phrase, then the preference is to postpone it. – MarcInManhattan Apr 28 '22 at 05:44
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    Does this answer your question? "Wake up Joe" or "Wake Joe up"? // The Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs marks this sense of leave out (omit; not include) as being optionally separable. … There are two provisos: (1) the multi-word verb is obligatorily separable with pronoun 'prepositional objects' ('leave them out', not 'leave out them') (2) the MWV is obligatorily inseparable for weightier direct objects (as Marc says). //// 'Ryan' being not a pronoun and not linguistically weighty, either order is fine. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 28 '22 at 11:41
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    This is a standard alternation for phrasal verbs, often called Particle Shift. It's optional for full noun phrase objects, but obligatory fir pronoun objects. Like all syntactic transformations, it has no effect on meaning. – John Lawler Apr 28 '22 at 19:29

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