Proper Use of Prepositions in Academic Writing

Published June 20, 2026  |  Last updated August 10, 2026

Prepositions in academic writing carry more weight than their two or three letters suggest. A single swapped preposition can turn “compared with the control group” into a vaguer, weaker claim, or make “the patient presented to the emergency department” read as if something got lost in translation. Reviewers rarely reject a manuscript over one wrong preposition, but a paper that mixes up “in,” “at,” “on,” “between,” and “among” throughout tells an editor the language wasn’t checked carefully, and that impression colors how the rest of the paper gets read. This guide works through where prepositions actually trip up academic writers, what the current APA, AMA, and Chicago style guides say about them, and what recent applied-linguistics research shows about the specific error patterns non-native English speakers produce, along with several corrections to claims that circulated in an earlier version of this page.

Key Takeaways

• Prepositions anchor time, place, and the relationships between variables, and reviewers tend to read a pattern of preposition errors as a sign a manuscript wasn’t carefully checked.
• “Compared with” fits a detailed, data-level comparison, such as a treatment group set against a control group. “Compared to” fits a single, broad likeness, closer to a metaphor than a measurement.
• “Presented to” the hospital or emergency department, not “presented at,” is the standard collocation in clinical and case-report writing.
• Corpus-linguistics research shows preposition errors cluster around specific, learnable phrase patterns rather than occurring randomly, and targeted practice on those patterns measurably improves accuracy.
• Editverse’s manuscript editing services check preposition use, along with the rest of a manuscript’s language, against current style-guide conventions before submission.

Quick-Reference Table for Prepositions in Academic Writing

Use this table as a working reference before digging into the error patterns below. Organized by function rather than by individual word, it matches how reviewers actually notice problems. They rarely spot “the wrong word” in isolation; they notice a relationship, a time, a place, a comparison, that reads slightly off.

Why Small Words Carry Real Weight in Scientific Prose

A misplaced preposition rarely changes a sentence’s meaning beyond recognition, but it does something else that matters just as much during peer review, signaling how carefully a manuscript was checked before submission. An editor scanning a methods section for “samples were collected in three hospitals” versus “samples were collected at three hospitals” won’t reject a paper over that single choice, yet a pattern of similar slips across the introduction, methods, and discussion sections adds up to an overall impression of carelessness, and that impression colors how a reviewer reads the science itself.

Prepositions do three jobs in a typical research sentence. They anchor time, as in samples collected on day fourteen. They anchor place, as in measurements taken at the bedside. And they connect ideas, as in differences between two groups or an association among several variables. Native speakers absorb these patterns unconsciously through years of reading and listening, which is exactly why the rules rarely show up written down anywhere. Writers who learned English later in life, or who learned it mostly from textbooks rather than immersion, don’t have that same reservoir of absorbed patterns to draw on, so an error that looks obvious to a native-speaking reviewer can be genuinely hard to predict from grammar rules alone.

Why Non-Native and Novice Writers Struggle With This Word Class

Kojima and Popiel, writing in the Journal of Korean Medical Science, built their 2023 guidance for non-native English-speaking researchers around this exact gap. Their paper walks through real revision examples pulled from manuscripts, including a methods sentence originally drafted as “a laryngectomy tube was inserted in the operative field” and corrected to “inserted into the operative field,” since “into” captures the tube’s movement from outside the field to inside it, while “in” only describes a static location. A second example moves the opposite direction on the scale of place, pairing “at” with a specific institution and “in” with the surrounding city in “the conference was held at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.” English scales its location prepositions to the size of the place being described.

Corpus-linguistics research backs up why this particular word class resists memorization. Kang, Shin, and Yoo tracked preposition errors in a corpus of Korean high-school EFL writing, identified the specific multi-word sequences where those errors clustered most heavily, then tested two teaching approaches built around ten of those sequences on one hundred students. A separate corpus study by Lee, Yoo, and Shin examined how Korean university students used prepositions inside common academic phrase patterns and found consistent, predictable substitution errors rather than random mistakes, meaning learners were applying real rules, just the wrong ones for the context at hand. Ku’s 2025 corpus analysis pushed the comparison further, contrasting prepositional-phrase patterns between L2 writers whose first languages are Indo-European and writers whose first languages are not, and found that shared grammatical structure with English measurably changes which preposition errors a writer is likely to make.

None of this research suggests non-native writers need a longer list of rules to memorize. Lexical-bundle instruction worked in Kang, Shin, and Yoo’s study because it targeted the specific phrase patterns where real students actually made real errors, rather than teaching prepositions as an abstract grammatical category. A checklist near the end of this guide follows the same logic.

Common Preposition Errors in Academic Manuscripts, Corrected

Most preposition errors in academic manuscripts fall into a short list of repeatable patterns. Several rows in the table below correct errors that appeared, backward, in an earlier version of this guide.

Compared To or Compared With

Both prepositions are grammatically correct, and the choice between them changes what a sentence claims. Chicago Manual of Style frames the distinction as investigating similarities and differences in detail versus simply noting that one thing resembles another, and AMA Manual of Style draws a matching line for medical and scientific writing. Use “compared with” when a sentence walks through a detailed, often numerical comparison, and reserve “compared to” for a single, broad likeness, closer to a metaphor than a measurement.

A results sentence reporting that mean recovery time was 4.2 days in the treatment group compared with 7.1 days in the control group fits the detailed pattern exactly, since two measured numbers sit against each other. “The spread of the outbreak was compared to a wildfire” fits the other pattern, since it draws a single illustrative likeness rather than a measured comparison. An earlier version of this guide reversed this rule and labeled “compared with the control group” as the incorrect option. That guidance was wrong, and it has been fixed here.

Presented To, Not Presented At

Case reports and clinical manuscripts describe a patient’s arrival with “presented to,” almost without exception. A scan of case reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms the pattern, with phrasing such as “a 39-year-old man presented to the emergency department with a four-week history of …” appearing across specialties and case types. “Presented at” describes something different, typically a researcher presenting a paper or a poster at a conference, not a patient arriving at a facility. Writers whose first language treats arrival and location with a single preposition sometimes reach for “at” here by analogy, an understandable substitution, just not the one English medical writing actually uses.

Prepositions of Time, Place, and Direction Across a Manuscript

A methods section leans hardest on time prepositions, since nearly every procedure needs a “when.” Chicago Manual of Style editors note that prepositions resist tidy standardization more than most grammar points, and their own usage FAQ recommends checking a dictionary’s example sentences whenever “in” versus “at” isn’t obvious, rather than assuming one universal rule covers every case. That advice matters more in a methods section than almost anywhere else in a paper, since a vague or wrong time preposition can genuinely obscure when a measurement happened relative to an intervention.

Kojima and Popiel’s revision examples make the underlying pattern concrete. Their corrected sentence, fibroblasts were harvested on embryonic day 14.5, pairs “on” with a specific labeled day, matching how English treats named dates and days elsewhere in a manuscript. Swap the labeled day for a duration and the correct preposition changes with it. “For” measures a span, as in cultured for 48 hours, while “during” attaches to a named period rather than a count, as in during the culture period, not during 48 hours.

Place prepositions scale to the size of what’s being described, the same logic behind “at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda” from the same paper. A specific room, instrument, or institution takes “at.” A city, state, or country takes “in.” A surface takes “on.” None of these choices are arbitrary, but none of them reduce to one memorizable rule either, which is exactly why a dictionary or corpus check earns a place in the editing process rather than counting as optional polish.

Direction prepositions show up most in methods sections describing sample handling. “Into” marks movement across a boundary, from outside a container to inside it, the way Kojima and Popiel’s laryngectomy-tube example does. “Through” marks movement all the way across something, useful for describing filtration, perfusion, or signal transmission. “Toward” marks direction without necessarily reaching the destination, which matters when a sentence describes an approach or a trend rather than a completed action.

What APA, AMA, and Chicago Style Actually Say

General style guides say less about individual prepositions than writers often expect, and what they do say has shifted over time. APA’s current Publication Manual, now in its seventh edition since 2020, doesn’t dedicate a section to preposition choice specifically. Its grammar guidance targets precision more broadly, steering writers away from vague qualifiers such as “very few” or “practically” in a results section, away from unnecessary jargon, and toward the exact word a sentence needs rather than an approximate one. A wrong preposition is really a precision failure of that same kind, just at the level of a two-letter word instead of a whole phrase.

Chicago Manual of Style, now in its eighteenth edition, takes the most direct position of the three on a preposition question writers ask constantly. Can a sentence end with one? CMOS 5.180 states plainly that no such rule exists, calling the traditional prohibition “an unnecessary and pedantic restriction,” and Chicago’s own FAQ traces that permissive stance back to its fifteenth edition in 2003, when the manual first spelled it out explicitly rather than leaving it unaddressed. That same FAQ takes on double prepositions sitting next to each other, noting that constructions like “ran out of the house” are “perfectly grammatical and idiomatic,” while cautioning that “off of” reads as informal and is better avoided in a manuscript. For choosing between two prepositions that both sound plausible, such as “in” or “at” the top corner of a figure, CMOS 5.195 lists common word-preposition pairings but ultimately recommends checking a dictionary’s example sentences, since idiom, not a universal rule, usually decides the answer.

AMA Manual of Style, the reference most journals in clinical and biomedical fields point authors toward, draws its sharpest preposition-specific line around comparisons, splitting “compared with” and “compared to” by function rather than treating them as interchangeable synonyms. That distinction, with worked examples of each, appears in full in the comparisons section above.

Commonly Confused Prepositions in Scientific Writing

A handful of preposition pairs cause disproportionate trouble because both options are grammatical English, just in different situations. Getting the situation wrong, not the word itself, is usually what produces the error.

• Between versus among. Reserve “between” for two specific items or a direct one-to-one relationship, and “among” for three or more, or for a diffuse group rather than named individuals. Kojima and Popiel’s own example applies both correctly in a single sentence, an association between physical activity and depressive symptoms among Japanese workers.
• Different from, different than, and different to. “Different from” is the standard choice in formal American English and the safest default for a manuscript. “Different than” turns up often in American speech, particularly before a full clause, as in the results were different than we expected, but many editors still flag it in formal prose. “Different to” belongs to British English and reads as an error to editors trained on American conventions, worth flagging for any manuscript headed to a US-based journal.
• Based on versus based off. “Based on” is the standard, formal form. “Based off” and “based off of” turn up constantly in casual speech but not in edited academic prose, and a copyeditor will change them on sight.
• Depend on, not depend of. This one is purely idiomatic. English pairs “depend” with “on” as a fixed unit, and no amount of logical reasoning about the word “depend” predicts that pairing on its own. Fixed idioms like this are exactly what a dictionary or corpus search resolves faster than a grammar rule ever will.

Strategies and Tools for Getting Prepositions Right

Dictionaries remain the fastest check for a genuinely idiomatic pairing like “depend on” or “consistent with.” A general dictionary usually shows a word’s typical prepositions inside its example sentences, and a collocation dictionary goes further, listing the prepositions, and other words, that regularly pair with a given term. Google’s Ngram Viewer adds a different kind of evidence, charting how often a phrase like “compared with” versus “compared to” has actually appeared in published English over time, useful for confirming a hunch rather than deciding a rule from scratch.

Corpus tools go a step further for anyone writing in a specific discipline. Discipline-specific academic corpora, along with the Corpus of Contemporary American English, let a writer search how “associated with,” “compared with,” or “based on” actually get used across thousands of published sentences, settling borderline cases that a dictionary alone can’t. Grammarly and ProWritingAid catch a meaningful share of preposition slips automatically, though neither tool reliably catches the comparison-verb distinction covered earlier, since “compared with the control group” and “compared to the control group” are both grammatically valid sentences that only differ in what they claim. Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab maintains a free reference guide to prepositions of location, and George Mason University’s Writing Center publishes a similarly practical guide to prepositions, both worth bookmarking for exactly this kind of borderline case.

Peer feedback catches what automated tools miss most often. A colleague reading a methods section for the first time will stumble on an odd preposition the way a reviewer eventually will, which makes that read-through worth doing before submission rather than after a revise-and-resubmit request arrives. Preposition errors also tend to travel alongside other language issues, imprecise word choice, overlong sentences, inconsistent terminology, so a pass that checks wordiness and redundancy alongside preposition use tends to be more efficient than treating each issue as a separate editing round. For a fuller list of tools built specifically around this problem, see our guide to grammar tools and resources for non-native English speakers.

A Pre-Submission Preposition Checklist

Running a manuscript through a short, targeted check beats reading the whole document again hunting for “anything that feels off.” The list below covers the patterns this guide has walked through, roughly in the order they tend to turn up during a typical developmental edit.

• Search for every instance of “compared to” and “compared with,” and confirm each one matches a detailed comparison (with) or a single broad likeness (to).
• Check every “presented at” involving a patient or participant. If it describes someone arriving at a facility, change it to “presented to.”
• Confirm time references use “in” for years and long periods, “on” for named days and dates, and “at” for a precise clock time.
• Confirm place references scale correctly, “at” for a specific site or instrument, “in” for a city, state, or country, “on” for a surface.
• Flag every “between” that describes three or more items, and every “among” that describes exactly two. Swap as needed.
• Search for “different than” and “different to,” and replace with “different from” unless the sentence structure genuinely calls for “than” before a clause.
• Search for “based off” throughout and replace with “based on.”
• Reread the methods section specifically for “into” versus “in.” This pair shows up constantly in procedural writing and is easy to miss on a normal pass.

Prepositions Fit Into a Larger Pattern of Academic Writing Mechanics

Preposition errors rarely show up alone in a manuscript. A writer working in a second or third language typically shows a consistent cluster of mechanical issues across a paper, not just one isolated problem. Subject-verb agreement tends to break down in the same long, clause-heavy sentences where prepositional phrases separate a subject from its verb. Adjective and adverb placement interacts directly with prepositional phrases, since both modify how precisely a sentence locates an idea in time, space, or degree. Singular and plural noun errors often appear in the same sentences as preposition errors, particularly around collective nouns like “data” and “criteria.”

Two related patterns compound with weak preposition choices rather than sitting independently from them. Inconsistent terminology across a manuscript makes it harder for a reader to tell whether a preposition change midway through a paper is meaningful or accidental. Paragraph-level coherence problems often trace back to the same root cause as preposition confusion, sentence structure translated directly from another language rather than rebuilt around how English actually connects ideas. Our broader survey of grammatical errors in scientific writing covers these overlapping patterns in more depth, and a look at heading and title capitalization rounds out the formatting details a language check usually catches along the way.

How Editverse Checks Prepositions and Language Precision

Automated grammar checkers flag the easy cases well, a missing “the,” an obviously wrong “in” where “on” belongs. They flag “compared to the control group” and “compared with the control group” as equally correct, because grammatically they are, and only a reader who understands the sentence’s actual claim can tell which one an author meant. Editverse’s manuscript editing services pair native-English-speaking editors with subject-matter reviewers who read for exactly that kind of distinction, checking preposition choices against current AMA, APA, and Chicago conventions alongside the rest of a manuscript’s language and structure.

Conclusion

Prepositions rarely announce themselves as a problem the way a missing citation or an unsupported claim does. They sit quietly inside sentences, doing small connective work, until a reviewer or a careful reader notices that “presented at” sounds slightly off, or that “compared to” doesn’t quite match the detailed numbers that follow it. Working through the patterns covered here, time, place, direction, and comparison, accounts for most of what actually goes wrong in a typical manuscript, and the checklist above turns that knowledge into a search-and-fix pass that takes a fraction of the time a full re-read would.

Manuscripts headed for international journals carry extra scrutiny on language precision, since editors already work with limited time, and a paper that reads cleanly earns the benefit of the doubt on everything else. Editverse’s publication support team checks exactly these patterns before a paper goes out, alongside citation accuracy, formatting, and journal-specific requirements.

Selected Sources

1. Kojima T, Popiel HA. Correct Use of Articles and Prepositions in Academic Writing: Advice for Non-Native English-Speaking Researchers. J Korean Med Sci. 2023;38(48):e417. DOI: 10.3346/jkms.2023.38.e417.
2. Kang S, Shin YK, Yoo IW. Using lexical bundles to teach prepositions to Korean EFL students. J Second Lang Stud. 2024;7(1):75-98. DOI: 10.1075/jsls.00022.kan.
3. Ku Y. A corpus analysis of prepositional phrase-lexical bundles in academic writing: L2 writers from Indo-European and Non-Indo-European languages. Appl Corpus Linguistics. 2025;5(2):100128. DOI: 10.1016/j.acorp.2025.100128.
4. Lee YE, Yoo IW, Shin YK. The use of English prepositions in lexical bundles in essays written by Korean university students. J Engl Acad Purp. 2020;45:100848. DOI: 10.1016/j.jeap.2020.100848.
5. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed. Prepositions FAQ. University of Chicago Press. chicagomanualofstyle.org.
6. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed. “Compare to” vs. “compare with” FAQ. University of Chicago Press. chicagomanualofstyle.org.
7. AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors, 11th ed. Oxford University Press. amamanualofstyle.com.
8. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed. American Psychological Association, 2020. apastyle.apa.org.