Just Left Dangling ....

Lift Your Language

–What’s that dangling?

–Where?

–Oh, it’s your modifier.

–What?

What’s a dangling modifier?

A ‘dangling modifier’ is another type of misplaced modifier.

An inexperienced writer will often put one into a sentence to add meaning to a word or phrase that might be in the writer’s mind but certainly hasn’t been included in the sentence.

As a result, the modifier just ‘dangles’, with no purpose.

Here’s an example:

At the age of nine, my mother told me about the birds and the bees.
Already a mother at the age of nine?

Obviously, that’s not right.

Because it has nothing to do but dangle, the modifier ‘At the age of nine’ attaches itself to whatever word or phrase it happens to be closest to, which is the subject of the sentence, ‘my mother’.

Now it’s a dangling and a misplaced modifier — with hilarious results.

Here it is again:

At the age of nine, my mother told me about the birds and the bees.

How might you fix it?

It’s not really difficult. The best way is to rearrange or rewrite the sentence so it says exactly what you want it to say.

The dangling modifier (in bold) was comical because it seemed to be describing ‘my mother’.

Question: Who was aged nine? The sensible answer is ‘I was’.

The dangling modifier was supposed to add meaning to ‘I’, which didn’t even appear in the sentence. To fix it, we could put the ‘I’ in.

At the age of nine, I was told by my mother about the birds and the bees.

Because it uses passive voice (‘I was told’), this sentence sounds clumsy. It’s better to write the sentence in active voice (‘my mother told me’), and to put in a new clause, with ‘I’ as its subject.

When I was nine years old, my mother told me about the birds and the bees.

The supporting clause (‘When I was nine years old’), gives more information about the main clause, by saying when it happened.

You might think misplaced, or dangling, modifiers are just minor details but, when they confuse the meaning of your message or make it sound ridiculous, your potential clients will notice.

It isn’t too hard to get it right. A little logic will do it.

(Or an editor will) ☺️