I hope everyone has had a great month so far. It's been a while since we had a Grammar Rodeo from Cia, but it's back! Thank you, Cia for providing us with another great writing tip!

Okay, so maybe this seems intuitive. After all, we all write sentences every day, right? But sometimes the visual we’re trying to get across doesn’t work because of the way the sentence has been written. A lot of the time, this can be chalked up to dangling modifiers. What are dangling modifiers? I bet you’ll realize you intuitively know what I mean once we get to the examples, even if you didn’t know you knew!

So, dangling modifiers are words or phrases, usually offset by commas, that are supposed to explain more/better describe the subject of the sentence but don’t because the sentence structure either places the subject in the wrong place to work with the modifier or doesn’t have a subject at all. These can be dangling participles or gerunds, but that’s a little more exact than I want to go in for this lesson. We’ll come back to that though! Let’s try a few examples to show just how modifiers work, how they can go wrong, and how easily they can be fixed.

Example:
Having come to the same conclusion, the project temporarily halted.

Having come to the same conclusion is our modifier, but the subject of this sentence is ‘the project’. Can the project come to the same conclusion? No. So the modifier is dangling because the true subject is missing from the sentence.

Rephrased:
Having come to the same conclusion, the contractor temporarily halted the project.
The contractor can come to the same conclusion, so he can halt the project.

Example:
Without knowing what his job was, it was hard to pick the right outfit.

“It” didn’t know his job? That doesn’t make sense. In this case, the surrounding information might make it clear who/what ‘it’ refers to, but that doesn’t prevent this sentence from having a dangling modifier.

Rephrased:
Without knowing what his job was, Jacob found it hard to pick the right outfit.
Jacob didn’t know what his job was, so he could find it hard to pick the outfit.

​Example:
Long and boring, the author must revise their manuscript.

Is the author long and boring? No. In this case, the subject of the modifier is a ‘misplaced modifier’ because the manuscript is what is long and boring, not the author.

Rephrased:
Long and boring, the manuscript must be revised by the author.

This phrase properly describes what is long and boring, which could not be the author as a person (we don’t usually call a person long, lol).

So, basically when you have a modifier in the sentence, you want to make sure it takes place in the sentence close to the subject. If you’re unsure if you’ve structured the sentence properly to avoid a dangling or misplaced modifier, ask yourself, “Was the (subject) (dangling modifier)”? If you have it wrong, the question will usually show how your sentence doesn’t make sense.

Was the project coming to the same conclusion?

Was it not knowing what his job was?

Was the author long and boring?