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Consider the two sentences below

It is of crucial importance that we make more use of technology if we are to make progress.

and

It is crucially important that we make more use of technology if we are to make progress.

  1. What is the grammatical role of "of" in the the first sentence?
  2. What is difference between the two sentences in meaning and emphasizing?
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  • I don't think there's a difference in meaning. I just think the first sentence sounds slightly more natural.
    – Daniel
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 20:21

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"Of" in this case appears in its occasional role as a regular preposition (although it is a bit special in that it can only modify nouns, not verbs). The verb-subject ordering in your example sentences makes it a little more difficult to see, so I'm going to reorder the terms to demonstrate the links:

Our increased use of technology is of crucial importance to our progress.

The sentence above and both of your examples all have the same meaning. That is, the same facts are made clear to the listener in any of these cases.

The emphasis, as you rightly suspect, is slightly different in each case:

It is of crucial importance that we make more use of technology if we are to make progress.

  • Using the noun form of "importance" elevates the urgency of the assessment even higher, as does the more formal construction (consider an alternative: "It's crucial that we use more technology..."). This calls greater attention to the immediacy of the situation.

It is crucially important that we make more use of technology if we are to make progress.

  • Here, "important" is an adjective, so, while there's still a fair amount of immediacy given by the emphatic redundancy of "crucial" and "important", the specific method being recommended is emphasized a little more.

Basically, this "of" is a noun-modifying preposition that lends formality and re-emphasizes "importance".

At some point, they're close enough that the choice is more of a feeling than anything else. I happen to agree with @Daniel that the former construction is more pleasant, but my only guess as to why that might be is that the latter uses an adjective/adjective stack, that, beyond seeming more redundant than the adjective/noun in the first example, seems to imbalance the sentence a bit as the listener awaits the eventual noun on which to place these terms.

You may find this tool useful in the future (though it is not particularly user-friendly).

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  • Tyler Young, and how do you explain that "crucially important" has 800,000 hits on GS, whereas "of crucial importance" has 12,000,000 hits?
    – user114
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 21:14
  • @Carlo_R. I can only speculate: The latter is a special construction, idiomatic and familiar, while the former is a simple adjective/noun combination. Note that according to ngrams, the gap you're referring to is currently shrinking.
    – Tyler James Young
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 21:33
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    @Carlo_R. That's an artifact of the way Google generates its result estimates; the latter is inflated since it includes the common word "of". Similarly, "of crucial importance" gets ten times as many hits as "crucial importance". At any rate, Google doesn't share actual result counts, only estimates, so you can't make reliable inferences by comparing them; see Google result counts are a meaningless metric.
    – user230
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 22:24
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    @Carlo_R. The Google Books corpus has problems as well, but it's much more useful for this sort of thing. As you can see from Tyler James Young's useful link, the real gap is much smaller.
    – user230
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 22:26

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