Day 160: Use possessives instead of prepositional phrases.
Prepositional phrases are characteristic of loose writing. Sometimes they are necessary, but when they are not, we remove them. One way to do this is to convert prepositional phrases showing ownership into possessives. Consider this sentence.
“I understand the minds of the readers.”
Here, the prepositional phrase is “of the readers,” which is being used to describe ownership of the minds. Since we are trying to show ownership, we can use the possessive form, which gives us the following sentence:
“I understand the readers’ minds.”
The revision removes the prepositional phrase and is more concise.