Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers (Word Usage)

Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers

Read the following sentence, and judge whether it is correct or incorrect: "Walking carefully through the garden, it was amazing to find ten different animals." Made your guess? If you said that this sentence, which seems perfectly normal and clear, is actually incorrect, you understand the common problem of the dangling modifier. Just about any fluent speaker of English could paraphrase the meaning of this sentence accurately; someone is walking in a garden, and this person (or these people) found ten different animals. However, it is precisely the missing "someone" which makes this sentence incorrect. Rendered properly, the sentence could read "Walking carefully through the garden, I was amazed to find ten different animals." Although the difference is very subtle, it is nonetheless very important, not for successful communication (since people will know what you mean in this case), but for grammatical accuracy.

The first example sentence is what is known as a "dangling modifier," which basically means that something which modifies the subject of the sentence is "dangling" without any subject to modify. Looking at the first sentence again, what is the subject, what is doing the walking through the garden? "It" is only a dummy word here, used to make the syntax of the second half of the sentence work. The animals are certainly not walking, but are rather the things found on the walk. This leaves us without any nouns or pronouns to look to, and so we can see that this sentence actually has no subject, and so is not a real sentence at all, but rather a strangely complete-sounding fragment. The second sentence solves this problem, by introducing the pronoun "I" directly after the long modifier which leads the sentence. In cases like this, when you lead the sentence with a phrase that does not contain a subject, always make sure to follow it directly with the subject of the sentence, which will be the thing that is doing the action mentioned in the opening phrase.

Misplacing your modifiers can also lead to confusion and accidental humor, as it does in the following example: "As the criminal ran away from authorities on the train, he was shot in the caboose." Now, this amusing sentence makes what actually happened difficult to discern because the modifier "in the caboose" is misplaced, leaving the reader to decide if the man was shot while he was in the caboose of the train, or whether he was shot in his butt, for which "caboose" is a very common slang term. The way this sentence is written, the latter meaning is actually better supported by the grammar of the sentence, though we can imagine that if we read this in a newspaper we would assume the author intended the former meaning. Avoiding such confusion is possible if you are careful to place modifiers near what they modify, and away from other things they could modify. To make this sentence clearer (although less funny), it could be rewritten as follows: "As the criminal ran away from authorities on the train, he was shot as he entered the caboose." Here, by placing "as he entered" in place of "in," it becomes crystal clear that the sentence is not describing in what part of his body the criminal was shot, but rather his location as he was shot.

Here is another amusing example of modifiers causing confusion and humor: "Swinging from branch to branch, I saw the active monkey smiling and eating bananas." In this case, the sentence is grammatically correct, as the pronoun "I" (the subject of the sentence) follows the lead modifying phrase. However, remembering that the modifier must modify the first noun or pronoun that follows it, it is the watcher, the human "I" who is swinging from branch to branch as he sees the monkey! To correct this error, move the lead phrase to a position after "monkey" so that it is clear what is doing the swinging, or get rid of the "I" completely, and make the sentence entirely about the monkey. Either solution is correct, and will resolve the confusion created by the first sentence.