Video lesson · Workplace English
Bottleneck: Grammar and Sentence Patterns
Learn how to identify, place, and resolve a bottleneck, including the correct in, at, and to prepositions.
In this lesson
To spot one: identify, find, or diagnose the bottleneck. To describe how it appeared: a step has become a bottleneck, or a new requirement created one.
To place one, use in or at for the stage — a bottleneck in the approval process, a bottleneck at the review step — and use to for the outcome it's blocking: a bottleneck to growth. Never bottleneck of — that's the most common mistake.
Read video transcript
Bottleneck patterns build around three moves: spotting one, placing one, and resolving one. Get all three, and you can talk about any bottleneck precisely.
To spot one: identify, find, or diagnose the bottleneck. To describe how it appeared: a step has become a bottleneck, or a new requirement created one.
To place one, use in or at for the stage — a bottleneck in the approval process, a bottleneck at the review step — and use to for the outcome it's blocking: a bottleneck to growth. Never bottleneck of — that's the most common mistake.
To resolve one: remove, eliminate, ease, resolve, or address the bottleneck. As a verb, say a step is bottlenecking the release, or the process is bottlenecked — never the process is bottleneck. And it's countable: a bottleneck, the bottleneck, several bottlenecks.
Want more examples? Read the related guide.