Avoiding prepositional pile-up

After receiving research ethics approval from the review boards at three teaching hospitals affiliated with two universities in urban Ontario, Canada, we asked clinical and educational leaders in each hospital to identify inter-professional clinical health care teams with reputations for strong collaborations and managerial/administrative support. These prepositions require the reader to sift through a host of details that elaborate the main clause—we asked clinical and educational leaders. What’s a preposition? The most common prepositions are the ‘little words’: in, to, with, on, at, of, for. Prepositions show relationships of: direction (e.g., from, to), place (e.g., under, over, in), time (e.g., before, after, during, until), cause (e.g., by, of, in order that), manner (e.g., with, among, against) and amount (e.g., most of, both of) [2]. Prepositions sit at the beginning of ‘prepositional phrases’ which include the preposition’s object: on the test; from the review board; with two universities; in urban Ontario, Canada. Prepositional phrases serve an important function, allowing the writer to provide additional detail about the main action. But a writer must ask herself, are these additional details really necessary? And if they are necessary, is a pile of prepositional phrases the best way to present them? In my sentence, five prepositional phrases provide additional detail about the main action before the reader encounters that main action: