7. Ending a sentence with a preposition: Writing at the Oxford Dictionaries blog, Catherine Soanes refers to the notion that one may not end a sentence with a preposition as “fetish” rather than a rule. And if you’ve ever tried to contort a sentence to avoid ending on a preposition, you might suspect that fetish is linguistic masochism. Like so many rules-that-aren’t-rules, this one gets blamed on Latin-loving English grammarians who thought they could squeeze an English-language peg into a Latin-language hole. Latin infinitives are contained in a single verb; therefore, we must not split infinitives. Latin prepositions must always precede prepositional phrases; therefore, English prepositions must always precede prepositional phrases. Even if you never learned it in school, Latin is still messing with your life.
There’s a cheeky sentence on the matter that is frequently (and apocryphally) attributed to Winston Churchill: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”
Soanes offers four examples of when it is perfectly alright (and perhaps even preferable) to end one’s sentence with a preposition:
passive structures (she enjoys being fussed over)
relative clauses (they must be convinced of the commitment that they are taking on)
infinitive structures (Tom had no-one to play with)
questions beginning with who, where, what, etc. (what music are you interested in?)
Fogarty adds that the one case in which you want to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, at least in formal writing, is when the meaning of the sentence doesn’t change when you drop the preposition, e.g. “Where are you going?” instead of “Where are you going to?” But in informal spoken English, you will see such phrases, especially in certain dialects.
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