This morning an e-mail message from our college bookstore transported and transformed me: , "As the official online bookstore of Marietta College, you can be prepared for class with complete confidence."
Somehow, this message does not fill me with confidence about the communication skills of our online bookstore, even if the sentence implies that I am our official online bookstore. But it does offer a real-world example of a type of sentence problem my students seem blind to: the dangling modifier. If a student submitted a draft containing the sentence above, I would attempt to explain the problem in marginal comment that the student might not read at all, or might read but not understand and not ask for help, or might read and try to repair but introduce new problems in the process.
Let's see how that works with a common example: Fumbling in her purse, the keys could not be found.
I comment: Who is fumbling? The keys?
The student who doesn't read or understand my question will leave the sentence alone and then wonder why I'm deducting points from the grade on the final version. The student who reads my comment, on the other hand, may revise the sentence in any number of ways:
Fumbling in her purse, the keys could not be found by Jane. (Dreadful.)
By Jane's fumbling in her purse, the keys could not be found. (Clunky.)
Jane fumbled in her purse. The keys could not be found. (Choppy.)
Fumbling for her keys, the purse remained empty. (Oh come on.)
Fumbling in her purse, Jane found the keys. (Perfect.)
I've tried a number of ways of explaining this problem to students, but either my explanations are inadequate or the students are unable to see the error. Like a roommate suffering from dirt-blindness, students look right past the messy bits or they tune me out when I start using words like modifier and noun phrase and subject.
If we're having a face-to-face conference, I'll ask students to read the sentence out loud or else I'll read it out loud with exaggerated emphasis on the faulty phrasing, but they look baffled. Sounds fine to me, they say. Everyone knows what I mean. You just don't like my style!
And at that point I just want to give up. I mean, the world is full of dangling modifiers; will it really hurt anything to let this one slide?
Fumbling for an answer, the solution remained elusive.
2 comments:
I was also stumped by the content of the second part of the phrase "prepared for class with complete confidence" - I was thinking what is "class with complete confidence" and why would I want to prepare for it - is this a social mobility thing? But that is just an english person forgetting that americans use the singular when we would use the plural. My bugbear is when people start a new sentence with "It" when as far as I am aware, the "it" can refer to either the subject or the object of the preceding sentence. But I work with non-native english speakers and I wonder if in latin languages what "it" refers to is less ambiguous than in english.
Oh, ambiguous pronouns make me crazy, except when Colson Whitehead uses them on purpose in his novel John Henry Days to draw connections between characters separated by time and space, which is a pretty sophisticated maneuver, unlike the clumsy confusion of pronouns seen so often elsewhere.
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