Business Grammar: Strengthening Preposition Use
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Error Hunt: What is wrong with this statement?
Dylan Minor, a visiting professor in Harvard Business School, and Michael Housman, chief analytics officer in Cornerstone OnDemand, studied just how costly toxic employees are using a large dataset of 60,000 workers across 11 firms from various industries including communications, consumer services, financial services, health care, insurance, and retail.
Answer: There are preposition errors. Prepositions are words that show location in time or space. They are used heavily in business grammar and can be especially confusing to non-native writers.
Examples are in, or, at, to, from, for, between, above, among, around, with, near, along, before, over, under, etc.
At is used with location, while In is used in fields of study or locations.
(Note: another problem with this statement is the sentence is too l...o...n...g, but the length is a style issue, not a grammar error. This long sentence is not grammatically wrong. But, it does make the information harder to absorb.)
Therefore, the corrected business grammar is:
Dylan Minor, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael Housman, chief analytics officer at Cornerstone OnDemand, studied just how costly toxic employees are using a large dataset of 60,000 workers across 11 firms from various industries including communications, consumer services, financial services, health care, insurance, and retail.
The corrected business grammar and sentence length style improvement is:
Dylan Minor, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael Housman, chief analytics officer at Cornerstone OnDemand, studied just how costly toxic employees are. They based their study on a large dataset of 60,000 workers across 11 firms from various industries including communications, consumer services, financial services, health care, insurance, and retail.
