The weird world of dangling modifers

A dangling modifier is when two parts of a sentence are dislocated grammatically. Is it a problem? Well, that depends.

First, a bit of background. A modifier is a word or phrase that changes or adds to the meaning of another word or phrase. For example, I could write:

“After weeks of procrastination, I finally got round to writing this blog post.”

The modifier here is ‘after weeks of procrastination’.This sentence is grammatically correct and, more importantly, the meaning is clear.

But things are less straightforward when you try to link two parts of a sentence that don’t have the same subject. That’s what’s happening in this example from the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar:

“Speaking to her on the phone the other day, her praise for her colleagues was unstinting.”

Grammatically, this sentence implies that it was ‘her praise’ that was talking on the phone. But readers immediately know that this makes no sense and understand that it was ‘her’ doing the talking. So the meaning is still clear, even if the grammar isn’t strictly correct.

And that’s why you’ll see dangling modifiers in lots of writing; sometimes achieving the overall effect of the phrase is worth bending the rules of grammar. Here’s an example from William Shakespeare, uttered by the ghost of Hamlet’s father:

“‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me.”

Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5

It’s fairly clear that the ghost is referring to the official story of his death, in which he was sleeping in his orchard when a poisonous snake bit him.

But sometimes a dangling modifier starts to change the sense of the sentence. If you’re aiming to create a particular emotion in your readers and you inadvertently create an altogether different one, then you’ve got a problem. Take a look at the following example.

“Driving through the forest, a bear emerged from the trees to confront me.”

In this example, the writer is on dangerous ground – not just because they’ve come face-to-face with a bear. The modifier ‘driving through the forest’ is left dangling because grammatically it can only refer the bear. So instead of describing a shocking encounter with a bear, the writer has created a surreal scene in which they encounter a bear that’s driving a car.

How could you fix this? You could give the modifier a phrase with the same subject to attach itself to. Such as:

“Driving through the forest, I saw a bear emerge from the trees to confront me.”

But a better solution might be to rewrite the modifier:

“As I was driving through the forest, a bear emerged from the trees to confront me.”

So a dangling modifier isn’t necessarily a problem – it’s what it does that matters. Try to avoid dangling modifiers that change the meaning of your sentences. And you should definitely avoid bears driving cars.