Be Your Own Editor

I’m going to explain two at-times subtle, but easy to fix, grammatical no-nos that every writer is guilty of employing from time to time. While you’re doing that final polish/scan of your manuscript, add “dangling modifier” and “misplaced modifier” to your list of things to look for.

First, the dangling modifier, or “dangler.” Called so because it “dangles” off the rest of the sentence on the other side of a comma, usually at a sentence’s beginning. They often contain gerunds/participles (”-ing” words), but not always. The problem? Such introductory phrases modify the subject of the sentence, but the writer often intends for them to modify another word, leading to mass confusion and rioting in the streets.

A few examples:

Walking home from school, the dog came upon Abby and bit her.
Cute, chubby, and covered in golden fur, I couldn’t wait to take the dog home.
Seeing that his enemies were out for blood, the situation looked grim for Tony Soprano.

Sorry about the Sopranos quote… I don’t even watch it. But it’s a good example. Let’s look at what’s wrong with these sentences: In the first, “walking home from school” is meant to describe Abby, but the construction turns it into a modifier for “the dog.” In the second sentence, “I” would probably not like to be described as chubby and covered in fur. Finally, Tony Soprano is “seeing” his enemies’ thirst for blood—the “situation” isn’t seeing anything. In each case, a word other than the subject is what’s supposed to be modified by the introductory phrase. But it isn’t.

The good news: easy to fix. Witness:

The dog came upon Abby and bit her as she was walking home from school.
I couldn’t wait to take the cute, chubby, golden-haired dog home.
Tony saw that his enemies were out for blood, and the situation looked grim.

Of course, each sentence could be worded ten different ways that are all correct. But you get the idea.

Now let’s look at the dangler’s first cousin, the misplaced modifier. These can be a little harder to identify and a little harder to fix, but a solution is always out there. And leaving them alone can, as with danglers, lead to confusion or the misreading of a sentence. A misplaced modifier is exactly what it sounds like: a modifying word or phrase (usually phrase) that is not placed next to the word or phrase it modifies and therefore appears to modify something else. Examples:

The chair had belonged to my grandmother that I sat on.
The shelves held stacks of books, buckling from the weight.
The policeman exited his car, there to arrest me.

As you can see from these examples, the misplaced modifier, in contrast with the sentence-opening dangler, often (but not always) appears later in the sentence than it should. Let’s examine these: In sentence one, I’m sitting on my grandmother. Not very nice. The second example tells us that the books, not the shelves, are buckling. And the last sentence describes a car that’s about to make an arrest.

Some possible fixes:

The chair I sat on belonged to my grandmother.
The shelves held stacks of books and buckled from the weight.
The policeman, there to arrest me, exited his car.

As with many of the grammatical points I make, these probably won’t prevent your manuscript from selling, unless it’s riddled with them. But they make for awkward sentences, and too many awkward sentences make for an awkward and amateurish read. So it’s in your best interest to watch for these mistakes—a copyeditor should fix them, but that’ll only happen if your manuscript ever makes it to a copyeditor!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.