
Dangly bits (Dangling modifiers)
April 1, 2010Having been tossed in the air, the boy caught the bottle.
I’m sure you can pick the problem here – it was the bottle being tossed in the air not the boy, but we get to have a giggle because ‘the boy’ is the first noun we read after the ‘modifying’ phrase. Happens a lot when the sentence begins with a modifier like this, which then ‘dangles’ disconnected from the noun it modifies because another noun is in the way. Or at least that’s how I think of it.
[...] rule is there to be broken. I could tell of the pitfalls of point of view slips, the danger of dangling modifiers, the crime of clichés or even how trite it is to marry adjectives to nouns based on them sharing [...]