Check Sentences for Misplaced or Dangling Modifiers

Let’s face it, misplaced and dangling modifiers are just plain fun (as long as it’s not you who writes them). A misplaced modifier usually just doesn’t make sense, because they appear to modify the wrong thing.

After our French lessons, we could understand the French spoken by our visitors from Québec easily. It’s misplaced because it sounds like the visitors spoke easily, when it’s our “understanding” that should be modified. “…we could easily understand…”

A dangling modifier often renders the sentence hilarious. The most famous example of a dangling modifier is by Groucho Marx:

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

There are web sites exclusively devoted to documenting them.

Here’s another example: “It wasn’t long before the two got engaged, lived in several Canadian cities, pursued their separate career paths and explored their new surroundings while weighing the pros and cons of each.”

What are they weighing the pros and cons of?

• Their surroundings
• Their separate career paths
• Several Canadian cities
• Their engagement
• All of the above

Avoid Ambiguous Pronouns

The best way to avoid this kind of confusion (what kind of confusion? The confusion that results from ambiguous pronouns), is to read your copy carefully checking that you can  identify the noun that belongs to the pronoun.

If more than one noun emerges as a possibility, replace the pronoun with its intended noun.

“There’s a high fly ball! Winfield goes back. His head hits the wall. It’s rolling toward second base.”

What’s rolling toward second base?

• The ball
• The wall
• Winfield’s head

Simplify Tense

Unless you’re a time traveller (and therefore familiar with temporal paradoxes), you’ll be confused by sentences where the writer did not follow a logical progression in time (that skipped writing course at university would have helped now) and now covers too much temporal real estate in a single sentence—don’t you start doing this!

English has twelve tenses. Present tense is the only real tense—all the others are factors of our imagination. The best rule of thumb is to stick to the present tense as much as possible and make occasional forays to other tenses as needed. Don’t make time travellers of your readers by hiking them hither and yon through your temporal landscapes.

EXAMPLE: “Madonna removed her wedding ring before she appeared last week sparking rumours that her marriage is on the rocks.”

Use Active Voice

The phrase, “Mistakes were made” is attributed to US President, Richard Nixon, to acknowledge that the Watergate situation was mishandled. He could have spoken in active voice and said, “Mistakes were made by me” or better still, “I made mistakes”, but he evaded direct admission of responsibility and thereby went down to history as Tricky Dick.

There are three times when it’s appropriate to write in the passive voice:

• When the doer is unknown. “My bass clarinet was removed.”
• When the doer is unimportant. “The lab rats were given a placebo.”
• To protect the doer from embarrassment. “You were overcharged for your purchase.”

TIP: In technical writing, you can distinguish between general concepts and action-oriented procedures by writing the former in passive voice and the latter in active.

Using active voice in web writing adds interest and action to your writing. Good sentences begin with a clearly stated subject (the doer) and a strong verb (action). While it is a commonly used verb, “to be” is passive as it describes a state of being rather than doing. So the more you use “to be”, the more passive sounding your writing will be. Also, some verbs are weaker than others. The verb “to understand” is weaker, because it is harder to quantify and tends to get lumped with another verb that’s doing the real work.

EXAMPLE: To understand how to run for President of the United States, you must have friends in high places.

Use Concrete Specific Words

Using concrete specific words won’t necessarily make your writing shorter, but it will make it more interesting to read.

Avoid:

• Several – how many?
• Numerous – What number?
• Various – Which?
• Very – use your imagination!

And of course:

• Stuff
• Junk
• Whatever!