A Word, Please: Left dangling, a participle can lose its logic

Danglers are an extremely important language concept. Not so much for writers as for jokesters. Danglers in writing and speech don’t necessarily hurt the reader. Often the message comes across just fine despite this dreaded error.

But for anyone who wants to elicit childish giggles, danglers are priceless. Case in point: a line from a long-ago episode of “The Office” in which Pam walks in on Michael as he’s changing clothes, accidentally seeing, as she put it, his dangling participle.

There’s one other group of people who find the concept helpful: editors. That’s because, though danglers don’t always hurt the message, they are imprecise and inelegant. Editors strive to make writing as accurate, unambiguous and elegant as possible. So if you feel the same, or if you want some fodder for childish jokes, here’s what you need to know about danglers.

A dangler is a modifying phrase that isn’t placed close enough to the noun it’s modifying. It may be closer to some other noun, creating the impression it’s referring to the wrong thing. A typical example: “Jogging at full speed, my hat came off.”

Why does this sentence constitute an error? Because my hat can’t jog. The dangler — in this case a dangling participle — suggests it can.

Jogging we usually think of as an action — a verb. But in this case we’re using a participle form, the “i-n-g” form, as a modifier. Our sentence above is an attempt to say that as I was jogging my hat came off. But if you look carefully at how this sentence is worded, we fail to say that. The noun closest to the participial phrase is “hat,” not the person who’s jogging.

Compare that sentence to: “Jogging at full speed, I lost my shoe.” This is proper form because the very first thing after the modifying phrase is the noun that was actually jogging.

Danglers come in different forms. Dangling participles always hinge on either an “i-n-g” participle like “jogging” or a past participle like “slapped,” “caught,” “infuriated” or “awakened.”

Consider “Slapped with a lawsuit, the savings account Joe had worked so hard to build was in jeopardy.” Compare that to “Slapped with a lawsuit, Joe worried he’d lose his savings.” The second one is correct because “Joe” comes right after the modifying phrase. The first is a dangling participle because the bank account is mentioned before the guy who was actually slapped with a lawsuit.

Prepositional phrases can dangle, too. “With a dismissive flick of the wrist, the door slammed on Mary’s exit.” Better to say something like “With a dismissive flick of the wrist, Mary left, slamming the door behind her.

Even nouns and noun phrases can dangle, as we see in: “A great man, the boat George Washington used to cross the Delaware is on display.”

The reason danglers aren’t a huge problem is that such egregious lapses in logic don’t happen very often. Even the most distracted writer would likely sense a problem with our George Washington sentence.

The danglers that slip past writers usually do so precisely because they’re not so bad. No reader has trouble with a sentence like “Boasting a menu of farm-to-table favorites, the restaurant’s reviews have been excellent.” Here, technically, we have a dangler because “restaurant” isn’t being used as a noun. It’s working as a possessive, which classifies it as a modifier. The closest real noun, therefore, is “reviews,” suggesting that they, not the restaurant, boast the great menu.

When I see a dangler like that, I try to fix it. But if all my attempted corrections make the sentence worse, I just might let the dangler keep dangling.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.