I have a bit of a background in both editing and writing technical documentation, so I often have to describe situations where users of a system can do stuff based on the roles that they are member of.... no, try again... their membership of system roles? Now that just sounds a bit clunky.
You see, although the acceptability of ending a sentence with a preposition is quite high in modern English as spoken and written by the masses, I really don't like the use of the word "of" in particular at the end of a sentence. It just looks plain wrong to me.
Talking about users and roles is a common thing when it comes to explaining how security works in an application, and I have had to do it on many occasions. Technically speaking, many users can belong to a role, and instead of assigning a permission (say, view a page) on a user-by-user basis, you can assign it once to a specific role. In that way, all users that belong to that role inherit that permission. As sentences go, those last two work ok, but I'm currently editing a document that talks about restricting functionality by role, so that the functionality of a thing, when accessed by an individual user, is restricted by means of a set of permissions assigned to the role(s) that the user is a member of.... and ARGH I'm back here again and I just have to put my thinking cap on and come up with a different way of saying it yet again!
Roles and security aren't that hard as concepts, but writing about them in a way that is clear, avoiding that damn "of" preposition at the end of the sentence, is a pain in the backside. Maybe I should just learn to relax a bit and let it go.