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Those, who are urging with most ardour what are called the greatest benefits of mankind.—Emerson.
Benefits of the benefactor, but to the beneficiary.
A power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can only come from an insight of [into] their whole connection.—Emerson.
From its driving energy, its personal weight, its invincible oblivion to [of] certain things, there sprang up in Redwood's mind the most grotesque and strange of images.—H. G. Wells.
4. Superfluous prepositions, whether due to ignorance of idiom, negligence, or mistaken zeal for accuracy.
As to Mr. Lovelace's approbation of your assumption-scheme, I wonder not at.—Richardson.
A something of which the sense can in no way assist the mind to form a conception of.—Daily Telegraph.
The Congress could occupy itself with no more important question than with this.—Huxley.
After than, the writer might have gone on if it occupied itself with this; but if he means that, he must give it in full.
5. Necessary prepositions omitted.
The Lady Henrietta...wrote him regularly through his bankers, and once in a while he wrote her.—Baroness von Hutten.
Write without to will now pass in commercial letters only; elsewhere, we can say 'I write you a report, a letter', but neither 'I will write you' simply, nor 'I wrote you that there was danger'. That is, we must only omit the to when you not only is the indirect object, but is unmistakably so at first sight. It may be said that I write you is good old English. So is he was a-doing of it; I guess is good Chaucerian. But in neither case can the appeal to a dead usage—dead in polite society, or in England—justify what is a modern vulgarism.
6. Compound prepositions and conjunctions.
The increasing use of these is much to be regretted. They, and the love for abstract expression with which they are closely allied, are responsible for much of what is flaccid, diffuse, and nerveless, in modern writing. They are generally,