Tip 654: "What's a Dangling Participle?"

From the Grammar Workshops: What’s a Dangling Participle?

Last week, we explored gerunds. 

This week, we’ll tackle dangling participles. 

Dangling participles are modifiers—they tell us about something—either separated from or flat-out missing the item they’re meant to modify—tell us about. 

And they often make us laugh: 

We saw three bears driving through the woods. What? Bears? Driving?

Coming out of the market, the bananas dropped on the sidewalk. What? Bananas? Coming out of the market?  

Oozing across the table, Marvin watched the spilled gravy. What? Marvin? Oozing?  

Whoa.  

Rewrite the sentences so the participle phrases (in these cases, the -ing words and their friends) are either closer to the items they tell us about or add the missing items the participle phrases are trying to tell us about: 

Driving through the woods, we saw three bears.

Coming out of the market, I dropped the bananas on the sidewalk. 

Marvin watched the spilled gravy oozing across the table. 

Why are they called dangling participles? Because they’re participles (verbs acting as modifiers) and they’re dangling (separated from the items they’re modifying).

Do participles always end in -ing? Not always. Sometimes they can end in -ed, -en, or some other form: 

She handed out cookies to the children wrapped in cellophane. An -edending (wrapped).

How’s that?

This is fun.  

Jack and Paul, thank you.