In formal, academic, legal, and journalistic German, writers replace the simple prepositions familiar from intermediate levels, such as wegen or über, with a set of more precise and elevated prepositions, almost all of which require the genitive case: angesichts, mangels, hinsichtlich, bezüglich, gemäß, laut, zufolge, and seitens. These are not interchangeable stylistic ornaments; each carries a distinct shade of meaning. Angesichts is used when confronting a fact or challenge that provokes a reaction ("in view of/given"); mangels specifically signals the absence of something that should have been present ("for lack of"); hinsichtlich and bezüglich introduce the topic of a discussion or piece of correspondence ("regarding"); gemäß, laut, and zufolge convey conformity with a source or standard ("according to"); and seitens identifies the party responsible for an action in a formal context ("on the part of").
The shared grammatical feature is the obligatory genitive case, a case rarely encountered in everyday spoken language, where it has largely been displaced by von + dative, but one that remains fully alive and required in formal writing. In the genitive, the definite article for masculine and neuter nouns shifts from der/das and ein to des/eines, and the noun itself typically takes an -(e)s ending; for feminine and plural nouns, die shifts to der and eine to einer, usually without any change to the noun's ending.
Important exceptions cut across this otherwise uniform group. Zufolge alone is always postpositional — placed after the noun rather than before it — and governs the dative, not the genitive, as in dem Bericht zufolge. Laut is frequently used in journalistic writing without any article at all (laut Experten), and when an article does appear, either dative or genitive is acceptable. Gemäß is flexible in position, appearing before or after the noun, but always takes the dative in either position, never the genitive.
The most common mistake at this level is treating all eight prepositions as a uniform set and applying the prepositional-genitive pattern to zufolge or gemäß, or assuming that dropping the article after laut in journalistic style is a careless omission rather than normal, accepted usage. Distinguishing these prepositions precisely, despite their apparent overlap in translation, is exactly what separates polished academic writing from clumsy formal prose.