A Word, Please: Danglers can render a sentence nonsensical

How big a problem is the dreaded dangler? In the real world, maybe not so big.

Danglers, though sometimes serious, often aren’t so bad. Some don’t harm your message at all and could slip by even the most careful reader. But for anyone who puts a premium on precision, it’s a good idea to avoid danglers.

A dangler is any modifying word or phrase that isn’t close enough to the thing it’s modifying. Take, for example: “Skipping merrily down the way, my hat fell off.” The part before the comma is a modifying phrase. Specifically, it’s a participial phrase, built on the participle “skipping.”

These phrases modify nouns, adding detail to a specific person, place or thing, just as adjectives do. But look closely at our example and you see that our modifying phrase is modifying the wrong noun: hat. The result? We’re saying that a hat was skipping merrily down the lane. This is a classic example of a specific type of dangler: the dangling participle.

Participles can be “ing” forms of verbs, or they can be past participles, which often end in “ed” but not always: “walked,” “vanquished,” “thought,” “sang,” “eaten” and “kicked.”

When these forms are used as part of a longer verb, they’re categorized as verbs. “Emily is skipping.” “Caleb was vanquished.” But when they act as modifiers, they’re considered to be more like adjectives. “Skipping, Emily daydreamed.” “Vanquished, Caleb went home.”

In each of these examples, the participle is not working as a verb. Its grammatical function is really that of an adjective. And when one of these modifiers isn’t close enough to the noun it’s meant to modify, nonsense like skipping hats can ensue.

Participles aren’t the only things that can dangle. Prepositional phrases can too. A prepositional phrase is a preposition like “of,” “at,” “with” or “on,” along with its object, which is a noun or pronoun: “of beauty,” “at him,” “with love,” “on the waterfront.”

Here’s how a prepositional phrase can dangle: “With love, the pen trembled in Blake’s hand.” The first noun after that prepositional phrase is the pen, which suggests that it is feeling the love instead of Blake.

Even nouns and noun phrases can dangle: “A great leader, the smile vanished from the general’s face.” Here we’re suggesting that the smile is the great leader and not the general.

Adjectives can dangle too: “Triumphant, the field was overrun by the players.” It’s a safe bet that the players, not the field, were triumphant.

A dangler doesn’t have to be at the beginning of a sentence. It can happen almost anywhere: “I photographed an elephant in my pajamas.”

The worst danglers are the ones with the potential to mislead: “A great man, Bob’s dad entered the room.” That’s technically OK if we meant that dad is a great man. It’s in error if we mean Bob. But either way, the reader of this sentence can’t be sure you meant what you wrote.

Some danglers are so innocuous that they may not be worth fixing — at least not if the rewrite messes up your sentence. For example, here’s a form I see a lot: “Recently renovated with plush banquettes and a soft color palette, the restaurant’s menu highlights local ingredients.”

At first glance, this seems OK because the word “restaurant” comes right after the modifying phrase. But actually, this “restaurant” doesn’t qualify as a noun. The apostrophe and S make it a “possessive determiner,” which functions as a modifier — that is, an adjective. So technically, the noun nearest to the modifying phrase is “menu,” suggesting that the menu has plush banquettes.

I fix those whenever I can. But when the only way to fix them would be to twist a sentence into awkward knots, sometimes I just let the dangler dangle.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].