Hello, authors!

It has been an immense pleasure working with you! You’ve taken me on many thrilling, romantic, and suspenseful adventures through your fascinating plots. Your dedication to the craft of writing is admirable, and I’m thrilled to be a small part in dispatching your stories into your readers’ imaginations!

As I’ve edited your novels, I’ve collected some topics to help you present your ideas even more clearly. The subject I’d like to address this month is dangling modifiers.

A modifier is a word or phrase that specifies (or modifies) the meaning of another word or phrase. We know, for example, that adjectives modify nouns (“fat cat”), and adverbs modify verbs (“quickly ran”) or adjectives (“unusually loud”). Similarly, a phrase can specify the meaning of a word (“Bending down, she smelled the roses”).

A problem occurs when a modifying word or phrase is left “dangling” in a sentence. This happens when the word that the author intends to modify isn’t clearly stated.

Here’s an example:

Walking into the room, Courtney’s hands reflexively flew up to slap the top of the doorframe.

“Walking into the room,” as written in this case, modifies “Courtney’s hands.” We can assume that Courtney’s hands weren’t walking into the room and slapping the top of the doorframe. To revise this sentence, we could place the modified subject immediately after the modifier. Here’s an example of how the sentence might be fixed:

Walking into the room, Courtney felt her hands reflexively flying up to slap the top of the doorframe.

Or we could revise the sentence, as in the following example:

As Courtney walked into the room, her hands reflexively flew up to slap the top of the doorframe.

Here’s another example of a dangling modifier:

After eating the crème brulee, the carpet was covered in crystalline sugar.

A corrected version might read as follows:

After eating the crème brulee, Rudy noticed the carpet was covered in crystalline sugar.

Here’s one final example:

To receive brownie points from your friendly neighborhood editor, modifiers may be properly placed.

Correct:

To receive brownie points from your friendly neighborhood editor, you may properly place modifiers.

I look forward to reading your continuing works (and to granting brownie points)!

Emily Steele

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