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Most time I used spend on in the case like: I spent 5 hours on learning Python everyday.

But, I happened to see a sentence: I spent a lot time in researching the problem. So I am curious about the difference between them?

Thanks in advance.

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    See: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/124331/…
    – user 66974
    Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 15:17
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's a duplicate of this question on ELL.
    – marcellothearcane
    Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 16:07
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    @marcellothearcane although ELL and EL&U are related, they are separate sites, independent of each other. The OP did not cross post because the older ELL post was written by a different user in 2017. I think we could keep this question here, without troubling anyone.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 17:18
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    @Mari-LouA The thing is it was migrated from here, which I assume could happen to this one if the ELL post wasn't there (assuming we still migrate the same sorts of things that we did in 2017). I think I read somewhere that ELL wouldn't appreciate us migrating posts which have a duplicate, so I guess it's a lack-of-research thing. (It would be cool if search also included ELL results - maybe worth a meta post?)
    – marcellothearcane
    Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 19:46
  • You could simply delete the preposition and avoid the problem altogether.
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Sep 24, 2019 at 2:05

1 Answer 1

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Prepositions are necessary, of course, but overuse can make writing sound passive and fussy. For example, the U.S. 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.”

I see both 'in' and 'on' as superfluous in these particular sentences. I'd suggest instead: "I spent 5 hours learning Python everyday." and "I spent a lot of time researching the problem."

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    You omitted more prepositions than is correct. Your last sentence should be "I spent a lot of time researching the problem.
    – DJClayworth
    Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 17:08

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