No, sentence-ending prepositions don't create passive voice

Once, after I mentioned in a column that there’s no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, a reader e-mailed the following:

"Regarding ending sentences with prepositions … We should avoid the practice because ending a sentence on a preposition almost always creates a passive sentence."

Huh?

I wrote back, trying to get to the bottom of what he was talking about — and trying to explain passives. He must have seen that his grasp of passives wasn't what he thought it was, because he backed off on that argument. But he stood firm against sentence-ending prepositions.

"Sentences that end on prepositions are longer, less comprehensible and less exciting than necessary. For example: That is the table the book is on. The book is on the table."

Sigh. I shouldn’t be shocked to see such a twisted grasp of the issue. And I shouldn't have been shocked that it came from someone who identified himself as a professional writer who taught English. But I was.

Yes, “That is the table the book is on” is a clunkier sentence than “The book is on the table.” But the clunkiness is not caused by a sentence-ending preposition. It’s caused by a desire to say something quite different from the other sentence. In the longer sentence, the point is that THAT is the table. The whole first clause is dedicated to clarifying which table we’re talking about. “The book is on the table” says something else.

So I e-mailed him the following examples:

Who are you blowing kisses to? / To whom are you blowing kisses?

A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool he murdered her with. / A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool with which he murdered her.

What are you talking about? / About what are you talking?

In none of these does a sentence-ending preposition cause a passive. (A passive, as I tried to explain to him, occurs when the object of a transitive verb, like “dinner” in “Joe cooked dinner,” is made the grammatical subject of the sentence, as in “Dinner was cooked by Joe.")

Nor does a sentence-ending preposition in these examples create sentences  that are “longer, less comprehensible and less exciting than necessary.”

He wrote back that the claw hammer example (which, by the way, I borrowed from Strunk & White) would be better as just “He murdered her with a claw hammer, not an ax.” I agreed. But that wasn't the point. The point was that some sentences work best with a preposition at the end. And there's no reason to object when they do.

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