Grammar girl here. In much the same way that poker players have tells, most writers also

have habits that careful readers consciously or unconsciously recognize as a writer's

specific style. These writing tells are often things your friends notice in your email messages,

and even if your friends may not know why, they'll recognize that the message came from

you. In academic or legal situations, linguists can even use algorithms to

assess writing and predict who wrote it by comparing it to known writing samples, as they

did when they were recently investigating whether JK Rowling secretly authored the book

The Kukku's Calling. When doing this analysis, researchers look at things such as vocabulary,

word length distribution, and how an author uses what they call function words, words such

as prepositions, conjunctions, and articles. I fear that if a linguist ever subjected my

first drafts to such analysis, the computer would explode when confronted with my flagrant

overuse of the word of. A while ago I was working on a technical document, and as I read

back through it, I noticed that there must have been 20 instances of the word of, of, of,

is a preposition, and although it's not an inherently evil word, overusing it can make

your writing sound passive and fussy. The US government has a plain language mandate,

and when they talk about omitting unnecessary words, they specifically call out prepositions

as a potential problem, saying, watch out for of, to, on, and other prepositions. They

often mark phrases you can reduce to one or two words. Here's a sentence that uses

of and could also use some editing. She's the wife of George. It reminds me of Margaret

Atwood's book The Handmaid's Tale, in which the handmaid's had names like Avfrad and

Avglan, to show that they belonged to Fred and Glenn. They were the handmaids of Fred and

Glenn. We can make that sentence more clear and direct by rewriting it without the word

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