Try not to dangle your modifier

Speaking as someone who began writing for pay in 1980, I am frequently appalled by the gross grammatical errors being committed at what seems like a growing rate by other people who write for pay. If they don't know not to say "Send the shipment to Sally and I" how in heaven's name will young people ever learn it's supposed to be "me"? (For a whimsical take on this mounting problem, see my February post entitled The death of me.)

It's bad enough that text messaging is doing everything in its prodigious power to eradicate the art of writing during what's left of my lifetime; I don't need paid copywriters accelerating the destruction.

If you don't write for a living you're forgiven in advance for not knowing that all those supermarket signs should say "10 Items or Fewer." You're also forgiven in advance for not knowing (a) what a dangling modifier is and (b) how to fix one.

A dangling modifier is a modifier that's left hanging, that doesn't have anything to modify. Here's an example I happened upon recently in a publication sure to surprise you (it sure surprised me):

Standing before a fawning crowd at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last April, Senator Barack Obama's usually finely calibrated rhetoric loosened up.

Who was doing the standing? The finely calibrated rhetoric? See what I mean? The opening participial phrase is a dangling modifier because there's nothing for it to modify. The writer got lost or changed her mind midway through her sentence.

To fix this problem the sentence would have to be rewritten more or less as follows:

Standing before a fawning crowd at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last April, Senator Barack Obama loosened up his usually finely calibrated rhetoric.

Ah. That's more like it. Now we've got someone capable of standing.

Maybe the writer wrote the sentence my way in the first place, then thought it would flow better the way it wound up in the magazine, not noticing the resulting dangling modifier. Whatever.

The really surprising thing for me is where I found it: in the opening sentence, rendered in extra-large type, of an essay appearing in the Columbia Journalism Review. Which pretty much gives you and me (not I) a free pass on dangling modifiers until the end of time.

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