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Dangling Modifiers and How to Fix Them
Strengthen your writing by avoiding this common — and glaring — grammatical error
Poorly constructed sentences are the bane of proofreaders, copy editors and pretty much any other word nerds out there. Truth is, readers are irritated by poorly constructed sentences as well — whether or not they understand what’s robbing such sentences of their clarity and intended meaning. Luckily the primary culprit — the dreaded dangling modifier — is easy for a writer to spot…when the writer takes the time to give certain sentences a closer look.
In, “Tips to Help You Fix Broken Sentence,” I suggest putting “your imagination to work as you read a sentence” and state, “The key is to listen closely to how your sentences sound when you read them, imagine breaking them into pieces, and play around with their building blocks — the words and phrases that compose them.” I also discuss the primary issue related to broken sentences — dangling modifiers.
The problem
While it’s important to understand why dangling modifiers are problematic, it’s also important to keep such discussions simple. For this reason, I’d rather show the issue to you before trying to explain it. Consider the following sorry sentence: “Pedaling down the street, the rain began to fall all…
