Dangling Participles, Multiple Meanings, and Squinting Modifiers
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
-Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers (1930)
One of the most difficult, but also rewarding, things I do as an editor is locate, wrestle, cajole, and reweave/undangle dangling participles or modifiers. A dangling participle is a type of ambiguous (unclear) grammatical construction in English. It is a phrase that modifies something in a sentence, but it is unclear what.
This is a breakdown in the composition, or what I like to think of as the syntactical weave, of the sentence–the thread the reader follows. Well, to call it a breakdown is maybe too strong. Sometimes it can be used artistically to play with the multiple meanings the weave of a sentence's syntax reveals. Virginia Woolf was a master here, as were humorists like Groucho Marx and Mark Twain.
Usually, though, dangling participles get stuck in a reader's throat, they break the syntactical weave of the sentence and leave the reader confused. They are particularly common for EAL (English as additional language) writers who are still mastering English syntax and the multiple meanings it makes possible. And they can be dangerously common for EAL academic writers who tend to employ long, multi-phrase sentences while demanding singular meanings. Here are some short examples:
A. After reading the original study, the argument remains unconvincing.
B. Having conducted interviews, written consent forms were needed from all respondents.
C. The individuals I interviewed occasionally asked to speak off the record.
The first two examples are traditional dangling participles. In both, the relationship of the phrase before the comma (,) with what comes after is unclear. In fact, the first seems to suggest that "the argument" read the "original study," while the second suggests that the "written consent forms" conducted the interviews! Here the ambiguity comes from the writer not clearly marking the subject or actor. It can be resolved by introducing the subject immediately following the modifying phrase.
A.* After reading the original study, I found the argument to remain unconvincing.
B.* Having conducted interviews, I needed written consent forms from all respondents.
The third example is a close relative of the dangling modifier; it is the squinting modifier. Here the problem is that the adverb "occasionally" can be read to modify both verbs in the sentence and so produces two distinct meanings. Does the sentence mean the interviewees occasionally asked to speak off the record OR that interviewees who were occasionally interviewed asked to speak off the record? The former meaning (which was the author's intended meaning in this real-life example) can be rewritten:
C.* Occasionally, the individuals I interviewed asked to speak off the record.
Tips for dealing with dangling participles
Always be very clear about the subject of a sentence--the who or what doing (or suffering, in passive formulations) the action.
Sometimes academic writers are tempted to drop the subject especially when it refers to themselves. This makes sense given the academic/scientific emphasis on objectivity and dismissal of researcher subjectivity. However, it leads to choppy, disorienting sentences that confuse meaning and leave the reader trying to tie it altogether.
Avoid starting sentences with gerund (-ing word) phrases. In fact, as much as possible try to start your sentences with the subject. Keep it simple. English likes Subject-Verb-Object sentences and it can be tiresome to try to connect all the other phrases and wandering modifiers even if they aren’t “dangling.”
When rereading or editing a text you have written, try to pay attention to each sentence’s weave, to how the pieces (individual words, phrases, and punctuation) are connected to produce a meaning that is greater than the sum of the pieces. Question these connections as you reread and make sure the meaning is clear and your intended one.
Another way to say this is that dangling and squinting modifiers fail to take the reader’s expectations into account. They tend to suppose that meaning is given rather than something the reader produces as they move through a sentence. Here is a fun example of a relative of the dangling participle: “The horse raced past the barn fell.” What does this sentence actually mean?? Let us know in the comments!
Happy writing,
The Editing Cooperative