Grammar School: Participles

by Meredy Amyx

Meredy is a recent retiree from a thirty-year career as an editor, the last decade of it in technical documentation at Cisco Systems. She currently freelances (http://meredyamyx.com) part time and is still in love with grammar.

Introduction

Let’s talk about participles. What are they and why do they dangle, and what’s so terrible if they do?

One reason for talking about them is that “dangling participle” seems to be one of the few grammatical errors that most people can name, maybe because it sounds slightly comical. Even if they can’t tell you what it is, they’ve heard of it.

A better reason is that dangling participles are one of the most common errors people make in writing. Amateurs and pros alike trip over those tangling dangling participles. So if we can learn to spot them and dodge the traps, we can make a significant improvement in our writing.

Participles

We get two participles with every verb: present and past.

The present participle is nothing but the root (that is, the infinitive, with necessary adjustments for -e endings and double letters) plus ing: working; thinking; writing; compelling; going. As a verb form this is used to express the continuing present.

The past participle is the form we use with “have” or “had”: the -ed form in regular verbs (worked, compelled) and the always interesting irregular ones that we just have to learn one by one (thought, written, gone).

Besides forming certain tenses of verbs, the participles are handy for making nouns and adjectives out of verbs. Participles have so many marvelous uses and subtle, complex features that it is a wonder they don’t have songs of praise written about them. But because they’re inclined to be tricky, they can trip us up.

Verbs as Adjectives

When can we use a verb as an adjective? When we’ve changed its form so that it can describe or modify something. The form that does that is the participle:

PRESENT PARTICIPLE: a working model, a compelling argument, an operating system

PAST PARTICIPLE: an ordered list, a written outline, a dropped connection

Nothing dangling here yet. Each participle is safely bound by proximity to the noun it modifies.

Danglers

When we get into trouble with the participles is when something separates them from the noun they’re supposed to modify so that they get attached to the wrong noun because it’s closer—or worse, when the noun isn’t there at all. This is most likely to happen when the participle occurs at the beginning of a sentence, introducing a phrase that precedes the main clause (the part of the sentence that can stand on its own). The classic dangling participle occurs in a sentence with this syntax:

   <participial phrase>, <main-clause subject> <main-clause verb>.

The problem that crops up here is a problem of relationship, just as we discussed in the introductory article. There is nothing wrong with this syntax; these examples are all incorrect because of the relationship of the participial phrase to the noun that is the subject of the main clause:

1. Waiting in the queue, the processor routes each message according to its priority.

2. Switching to standby mode, the power indicator turns amber.

3. Left to fend for himself after school, the mother worried about her young son.

4. Swollen from the bee stings, the doctor prescribed antihistamine.

In every case, the closest noun eligible for modifying is the first thing that follows the comma—the first noun in the main clause. So what we have here is

1. a processor that is waiting in the queue, instead of a message

2. a power indicator that is switching to standby mode, instead of whatever is supposed to do the switching (a system?)

3. a mother who is left to fend for himself after school, instead of a child—and note that the reflexive pronoun “himself” is also the wrong gender for “mother”

4. a doctor who is swollen from bee stings, instead of whoever is being treated (a patient?)

Sometimes the dangling participle produces a sentence that just sounds absurd, even if we can puzzle out what the writer really meant. And sometimes there is no way to figure out the meaning from the information given. Either way, the sentence fails to communicate clearly.

Detection and Correction

The way to spot the most common dangling participles is to pause whenever you see this construction—a sentence that begins with a present or past participle in a phrase followed by the main clause—and ask: does this phrase modify the nearest noun—the subject of the sentence? Look for the noun right after the comma, or the place where the comma should be.

If it doesn’t, the result is somewhere between unintelligible and ridiculous. And that’s what is wrong with it. The sentence hasn’t done its job properly, and doing its job is its whole reason for existence.

The solution for a dangling participle is always going to be to reword. Sometimes we just have to rearrange the pieces. Sometimes we have to go and fetch an element or a piece of information that isn’t there at all. Sometimes we have to rebuild without using a participle or a participial phrase. Retest the sentence: do we know what every participle modifies, and is it the right thing? If so, no more dangling.

Copyright © 2010 Meredy Amyx.