Trap 2: Dangling Your Participles and Other Embarrassments

When I was teaching English at UCLA, one of the students in my composition class submitted a paper in which he asserted:

After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.

I had a hunch I knew what he really meant to say, but then I hadn't seen his brother, and in southern California one never knows. So I wrote in the margin of his paper: "Please do not allow your brother to visit this campus."

What my student had created was, in grammatical terms, a dangling participle; in human terms, it was an embarrassment. Dangling participial modifiers are one of the most common and amusing mistakes people make when writing. Other howlers include squinting modifiers and misplaced adverbial modifiers.

It's easy to create these things. Everybody who writes produces one occasionally. That's why everyone who writes has to edit. Understanding them will help you avoid creating them and, thus, will keep you from embarrassing yourself in your proposals and undercutting your credibility and professionalism.

Dangling Participles

The most egregious of these constructions is the participial phrase that introduces a sentence. Whatever that phrase modifies has to follow immediately after it, because that's how the reader's brain will decode it. For example:

Featuring plug-in circuit boards, this server offers maximum flexibility and growth potential.

That's okay. The participial phrase "Featuring plug-in circuit boards" explains something about "this server," and the noun "server" immediately follows the phrase. So it's clear. It's unambiguous. It works.

But consider this one:

Featuring plug-in circuit boards, we can strongly endorse this server's flexibility and growth potential.

What do we have here? A robot proposal writer? We can fix this one by rewriting it:

Because the server features plug-in circuit boards, we can strongly recommend it for flexibility and growth potential.

Once you catch on to the dangling participle, you'll start noticing them everywhere. They're usually good for a few laughs, as long as they're not in something you wrote.

Squinting Modifiers

A squinting modifier is a word or phrase that could logically modify two different parts of a sentence. For example:

Clients who process data after hours frequently will save money by using the batch processing option.

"Frequently" is the problem here. It's squinting between two parts of the sentence, either of which it could modify. You could be saying that people who make a habit of processing data after hours will save money by using the batch option. Or you could be saying that even one instance of after-hours processing will probably be cheaper if done in batch mode.

The sentence should be rewritten to clear up the ambiguity. That means moving the squinting modifier:

Clients who frequently process data after hours will save money by using the batch processing option.

Or:

Clients who process data after hours will frequently save money by using the batch processing option.

Misplaced Adverbial Modifiers

This last construction is hard to describe but easy to demonstrate. You see them in job titles occasionally, which means they might sneak into the project team or resumes section of your proposal. For example, a company in my city employs "Vibrating Structures Engineers." The local university refers to one of the young women in its employ as a "Dishonored Check Collector." It's hard not to feel sorry for these people, isn't it? Perhaps appropriate medication will help those vibrating engineers, but probably nothing but time will heal the check collector's sense of shame and betrayal.

Be careful when lumping words together to form job titles or project titles. We want our readers to enjoy our proposals, but unintended laughter is probably not a good sign.