Swing from a Dangling Participle Quiz

Answer: The clock couldn't be wondering; the speaker is!

Assuming this is not a surreal novel about an anthropomorphic clock, we have to fix this sentence! As Strunk & White put it, "A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject." Otherwise, it is misplaced or dangling! We might rephrase in one of several ways:

"As I wondered irresolutely what to do next, the clock struck twelve."
"Wondering irresolutely what to do next, I heard the clock strike twelve."

Strunk & White give another "ludicrous" example: "Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap." Now just who or what is supposed to be dilapidated?

The above selections were from the third edition, although the publisher Bartelby has the entire text of the first edition of "The Elements of Style" online. But it wouldn't hurt to purchase a copy of a later edition to keep handy when you are writing quizzes, school papers, business reports, or anything else important! LibriVox also has an audio recording available.

Answer: The girl, no longer running in the park, realized she had lost her way.

Why are the other three choices wrong? Ask yourself: What is being whipped, the cook or the egg? Who is holding the money, the robber or the policeman? And while it is amusing to imagine the footballer flitting gaily from flower to flower, I suspect he was sitting still as he watched the bee gather up pollen.

A better to way to write the sentence about the robber, for example, might be, "The robber, still holding the money in his hand, ran from the policeman."

By the way, Damon's entire "Guide" can be found online at the Utah State University website, and it is well worth reading.

Answer: Change "it's really amazing" to "I'm really amazed"

While in written English it is better not to use contractions, eliminating them will not solve the problem with the misplaced modifier, nor will changing the preposition. Ask yourself, "who did the reading?" It was the speaker, so the long phrase beginning with "after reading" needs to modify a noun or pronoun referring to a person. "After reading what the editors go through, I am really amazed" would be acceptable.

Similarly, you would want to write, "After reading the newspaper, I finished my breakfast" rather than "After reading the newspaper, my breakfast was finished." You may notice that many times a misplaced modifier appears when the speaker needs to identify himself as the actor in a sentence rather than use passive voice or "it is". So don't hide behind impersonal constructions; be bold!

Answer: Yes

The subject of the sentence is "Obama's main opposition", not "Obama", and so the noun that the phrase "If elected" modifies is "opposition". The point Brooks was trying to make is that, should Obama be elected, he would have more trouble with fellow Democrats with Republicans. Perhaps Brooks could have written, "If Obama is elected, his main opposition will not come from Republicans."

The quote is from David Brooks, "Talking Versus Doing", published in "The New York Times" (20 May 2008).

Answer: disjunct

Other disjuncts, often sentence adverbials, are such words as honestly, unfortunately, clearly, in my opinion, and so forth. Many grammarians, including the venerable William Strunk, believe that "hopefully" should not be used this way. After all, the sun is not full of hope; the speaker is full of hope, so "hopefully" is an adverb just dangling, not attached to any adjective or verb to modify. (The correct sentence would then be, "I hope the sun will..." or some such.) Others say it is like "unfortunately" and modifies the sentence as a whole, just as "regrettably" does here: "Regrettably, we must decline your invitation." Some grammarians have further argued that just as one uses "regrettably" rather than "regretfully", one should use "hopeably" rather than "hopefully", but that nonce word has never caught on.

Answer: Only persons aged 30 and over can vote in elections.

Although you may see all those sentences plus others I cannot imagine, the only one that conveys the sense intended in the scenario is "Only persons aged 30 and over can vote". If you write "Persons aged 30 and over can only vote", you are suggesting that they can vote and do nothing else. If you write "Persons aged 30 and over can vote only in elections", you are suggesting that persons under 30 may vote in elections but in no other process" (which actually makes no sense). "Only in elections can persons aged 30 and over vote" would be another way to convey this last nonsensical idea.

By the way, I have noticed that French writers are more careful about the placement of "only" and other such adverbs than English writers, and that the misplacement really changes the meaning of the sentence. Learning to read another language makes one sensitive to that sort of thing!

Answer: No

This is an example of an absolute construction. The participial phrase "being blue and cloudless" modifies "sky", and is correctly placed to do so. The entire phrase "The sky being blue and cloudless" is the absolute clause, which is generally only used in writing and difficult to explain except by example. Here are three examples from "Descriptive English Grammar" by House and Harman:

"The dance being over, we left."
"The teacher being absent, we had no school yesterday."
"Weather permitting, we shall go tomorrow."

So what we have here is, I hope, not a failure to communicate, but a clause that is set apart from the rest of the sentence. It modifies the sentence as a whole, rather than any particular noun, so it is not erroneously attached. Grammarian William Strunk did not care for these, and I share his opinion, but they are not misplaced modifiers.
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By the way, "The sky's being..." would not be correct in the above sentence as being is NOT a gerund in the sentence above. Now, if I had written, "The sky's being blue is a good reason to have a picnic", then I would need an apostrophe.

This sentence from Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" is also correct: "'The darling!' thought Newland Archer, his glance flitting back to the young girl with the lilies-of-the-valley." It would still be correct if Wharton had written, "His glance flitting back to the young girl, Newton thought..."

Answer: in my pajamas

Why is this funny? Although normally we would understand that that hunter was in his pajamas, the misplaced modifier does in fact suggest that the elephant was wearing the pajamas. The prepositional phrase "in my pajamas" is an adjectival phrase that modifies the noun or pronoun closest to it, which is "elephant" rather than "I". To write this correctly, one might choose: "One morning while I was still in my pajamas, I shot an elephant." I must confess I like the funny but wrong phrasing better, but I don't recommend using it to write a paper for school or a quiz for Fun Trivia!

Answer: Buster and the horse are getting married!

It is possible that the writer of the intertitle thought to make a joke like the famous one about Groucho Marx shooting an elephant in his pajamas (how the beast got in them, we'll never know). It's also possible that s/he just wasn't aware of the mistake.

A more correct way to write this sentence might be: "He's run off with your horse to marry your daughter!" or better yet, "He stole your horse, and he's run off to marry your daughter, too!" I also found it strange that the hired hand seemed more worried about the horse than the daughter!

Answer: "Once recognized, a writer or editor can easily fix the dangler..."

Corbett made this mistake on purpose. "WAIT! IT'S A TRICK!" he writes. "That sentence has a classic dangler! The [participial] phrase 'once recognized' doesn't refer to what immediately follows, 'a writer or editor.'" His solution? "Once recognized, a dangler is usually easy to fix, and the result is a clearer, sharper sentence."

Corbett's article, "Left Dangling", was published in "The New York Times" on 15 May 2008.