A Guide To Learn English Language

What is a Dan­gling Modifier?

Dan­gling mod­i­fier is a word or a phrase that mod­i­fies the clause inap­pro­pri­ately. A writer may intend to mod­ify the sub­ject, but gram­mar rules seem­ingly mod­ify the object instead. Con­fus­ing? Maybe some exam­ples would help you to appre­ci­ate the prob­lem asso­ci­ated with Dan­gling Modifiers.

Hav­ing fin­ished the assign­ment, the TV was turned on.

Here ‘the TV’ is not the sub­ject of main clause (fin­ished the assigned). “Hav­ing fin­ished” is a clause express­ing action but there are no sub­jects claim­ing this action. In this exam­ple, the TV cant doesn’t qual­ify to be sub­ject because TV sets can’t com­plete assignments.

Hav­ing fin­ished the assign­ment, John turned on the TV.

In this case, we could actu­ally work out the cen­tral idea. But the catch is read­ers shouldn’t be work­ing out the mean­ing. They should appre­ci­ate the writ­ing as it is. In short, dan­gling mod­i­fiers lead to dif­fi­culty in under­stand­ing and some unin­ten­tional humour.

Golden Rules

If at any point of time you draw a chuckle, due to how you have said it rather than what you have said, then it has unfavourable out­comes. Few care­ful steps would go a long way in avoid­ing such mishaps.
Step1: Under­line all the mod­i­fiers in your sen­tences.
Step2: Match all the nouns fol­low­ing your dan­gling mod­i­fiers.
Step3: Ensure that your mod­i­fier and noun goes together log­i­cally. If not, you have a dan­gling mod­i­fier! Name an appro­pri­ate doer of the action as the sub­ject of the clause.
Step4: Rewrite the sen­tence.

Remove Dan­gling Modifiers

“Being asleep, the tele­phone star­tled me when it rang.”
Now, we would apply the above rules in this sen­tence and check for dan­gling mod­i­fiers.
Step1: Being asleep, the tele­phone star­tled me when it rang
Step2: Being asleep, the tele­phone star­tled me when it rang
Step3: The tele­phone can’t go to sleep. So we have a dan­gling mod­i­fier here. Here we have to intro­duce the doer of the action. Let us intro­duce the doer as “I”. Now “I” is the sub­ject of the main clause.
Step4: “Being asleep, I was star­tled when the tele­phone rang.”
Some­times, comb­ing the main clause and the dan­gling phrase helps in resolv­ing the con­flict.
The exper­i­ment was a fail­ure, not hav­ing stud­ied the lab man­ual care­fully.
As it is, the sen­tence would mean that the exper­i­ment failed because the exper­i­ment didn’t read the lab man­ual. This is illog­i­cal.
Apply­ing the above rules, we observe that we need to intro­duce a noun.

They failed the exper­i­ment, not hav­ing stud­ied the lab man­ual carefully.