🚀 go-pugleaf

Scott Thune offers a definition of a dangling participle as a phrase that
doesn't seem related to anything in the sentence. The problem is that the
participle must refer to the subject, so that in Scott's examples--

Before deciding on a strategy, a date has to be choosen.

        On coming back to school, baby-sitters aren't easy to
                find.

The date has to do the deciding (I ignore the misspelling of "chosen"), and
baby-sitters are the ones coming back to school. To correct them we might
write:

Before deciding on a strategy, we have to choose a date.
When mothers go back to school, baby-sitters aren't easy to find. (In this
case we've changed the participial phrase to a subordinate clause; if we
wanted to keep the participle, we could write: On coming back to school,
mothers have trouble finding baby-sitters.)

Most participial phrases begin sentences, but moving them to the end doesn't
change the problem. You just have to remember that what's in the phrase must
apply to the subject, and write the sentence accordingly.


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Crawford Kilian   Communications Department   Capilano College
North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
Usenet: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca
Internet: ckilian@first.etc.bc.ca