User:JingleJim

It's all about the music!

xo, Mom!

Grammatical quibbler

Parts of speech

These are not verbs:

• impact
• source
• gift
• critique
• birth

This is not a noun:

• military

This is not not an adjective:

• quality

Dangling participles

If a sentence begins with a participial phrase, the noun the participle modifies needs to be the subject of the sentence. Far too often, the participle modifies something else.

For example, a sentence in The Path to Rome read, "Born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, in 1870 to a French father and an English mother, Belloc's family moved to England shortly after his birth, eventually settling in Sussex." The descriptive participial phrase at the start is "Born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, in 1870 to a French father and an English mother". The participle, "born", refers to Belloc. However, the core sentence is "Belloc's family moved to England shortly after his birth". The simple predicate of the sentence is "moved", and the simple subject is "family": the family moved. The participle should also be something the subject of the sentence did or was, but here, the participle is something Belloc himself did: be born. The family wasn't born in 1870, he was. But the sentence says the family was "born . . . in 1870": "born" is attached to the wrong noun. Editing of this sentence to eliminate that dangler gives "Born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, in 1870 to a French father and an English mother, Belloc moved with his family to England shortly after his birth..." An alternative fix might be "Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, in 1870 to a French father and an English mother; his family moved to England shortly after his birth."

Pronouns and antecedents

As you may remember from elementary school, a pronoun takes the place of a noun. The specific noun it replaces is its antecedent. As the name implies, the antecedent comes before the pronoun (otherwise, how would you know to what it refers?); occasionally, for stylistic reasons, it comes afterward. Ideally, the pronoun refers to the noun (of that class) right before it: the closest one. However, one often sees pronouns separated from their antecedents by multiple (other) nouns, raising potential confusion as to which noun the pronoun replaces, for example, "The car needed a transmission, so Charlie bought a new one." He bought a new transmission, or a new car? This is the dreaded "unclear antecedent", and it pops up often in contemporary writing. This is often because the writer doesn't see the confusion: after all, he knows what he's trying to say, but somebody else may not. This is one of the reasons that a "fresh set of eyes" is helpful in review.

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