Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and Contracts

Trap 2: Dangling Your Participles and Other Embarrassments

When I was teaching English at UCLA, one of the students in my composition class submitted a paper in which he asserted:

After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.

I had a hunch I knew what he really meant to say, but then I hadn’t seen his brother, and in southern California one never knows. So I wrote in the margin of his paper: “Please do not allow your brother to visit this campus.”

What my student had created was, in grammatical terms, a dangling participle; in human terms, it was an embarrassment. Dangling participial modifiers are one of the most common and amusing mistakes people make when writing. Other howlers include squinting modifiers and ...