What Is A Dangling Modifier? - The Grammar Guide. A modifier describes, clarifies, or gives more detail about a concept. A dangling modifier occurs when the subject the modifier is supposed to describe is not the subject of the sentence.
Correcting Dangling Modifiers
Dangling modifiers change the meaning of the sentence in an unintended way. When you see a phrase in a sentence, and you can’t be sure which word it’s referring to, chances are it’s a dangling modifier. You will have to identify and improve faulty modifiers in the writing section of the sat® test. What is a dangling modifier? You read a sentence but feel something is wrong with it, so you read it again and notice the doer of the action has escaped and is nowhere to be found. It all starts on a cold, dark night…you’re sitting on the sofa, wrapped up in a soft blanket, holding a tablet in your hand. A dangling modifier will often give itself away by seeming misplaced or describing the wrong element in a sentence. This typically happens when the introduction of a sentence isn’t clearly tied to the noun doing the action (a similar topic to my post about unclear antecedents ). A dangling modifier is a part of a sentence that doesn’t clearly refer to its intended subject. In this case, a modifier is associated with a word that is different from the one the author meant, or with no word at all.
A modifier describes, clarifies, or gives more detail about a concept. You can use it to ensure your book, post or article is accurate and easy to check out. Your descriptive phrase should modify the closest noun, and in cases where it’s misplaced, the results can be pretty funny. What is a dangling modifier? The first is due to the modifying word or phrase being placed too far from the word or group of words it’s meant to modify. A modifier often occurs at the beginning of a sentence. Having nothing to modify, the phrase just “dangles” without purpose (hence its name). The word or words a dangling modifier should modify have been omitted from the sentence. Let’s look at some more examples, and then we will adjust them: As you can see from the following examples, the sentences should. A reinforcing question can be “would this sentence work on its own if someone didn’t know what i was writing about?” if the answer is no, then you may well have an issue with a dangling modifier.
