Spot the fault in this sentence

“Born in 1955, Adrian’s masterpiece was a book of comic rhymes.”

Answer:

Adrian’s BOOK wasn’t born in 1955 – HE was!

“Born in 1955, Adrian went on to produce his masterpiece, a book of comic rhymes.”

What’s going wrong here?

Generally speaking, in English prose a scene-setting phrase such as “born in 1955” is automatically understood to belong to the person or thing nearest to it in the sentence. In our example. technically speaking it’s a misplaced adjectival phrase. In the original sentence the phrase should belong to Adrian, but as written, it belongs to his masterpiece instead. It’s part of a group of errors that come under the name “dangling modifiers”.

Why this happens

You’ll find this mistake frequently in quasi-formal prose such as voiceovers for documentaries. The writer wants his or her words to sound portentous, and can’t resist the temptation to use weighty-sounding journalese, even when it doesn’t actually make sense. In practice, we probably understand what sentences with this mistake mean, but the writers are asking us to make allowances for their lack of precision. Why should we have to?

I can’t resist repeating the words of writer Bill Bryson, who famously called out this mistake in his book Troublesome Words. He said, “Consideration for the reader should be the writer’s guiding principle.”

By the way, there’s a further big flaw in my initial example, but that’s another story. See “The causal fallacy” below*

Missing agent

How about this sentence?

“Having found fame with his original anthology, Adrian’s later work was largely dismissed by his public.”

The sentence actually says that Adrian’s LATER WORK found fame with his original anthology. It’s nonsense! The opening phrase, “Having found fame …” is truly dangling in this case because grammatically it doesn’t relate to anything else in the sentence. Technically, it doesn’t have an “agent”.

You’d have to rewrite it in this sort of way:

“Although Adrian found fame with his original anthology, his later work was largely dismissed by his public.”

The dangling ellipse

Here’s a different version of the problem:

“While working on his later books, fame and fortune distracted him.”

FAME AND FORTUNE weren’t working on his later books, HE was! It should read:

“While HE WAS working on his later books, fame and fortune distracted him.”

The “he was” is left out of the first sentence on the assumption that it will be inferred, but the reader or listener doesn’t know that, and in the absence of it, will assume that subject of the sentence has yet to come, so it must be “fame and fortune”.

Again, the true meaning is obvious, but the grammatical fault is a hump in the road to comprehension.

*The causal fallacy

Not only is my original example grammatically wrong; it’s also fundamentally misleading. Even if you rewrite it correctly, it’s still flawed. Here it is again:

“Born in 1955, Adrian went on to produce his masterpiece, a book of comic rhymes.”

This tells the audience that there’s a causal link between the two statements. It’s saying, “BECAUSE Adrian was born in 1955, he went on to produce his masterpiece, a book of comic rhymes.” Maybe so, but there’s no evidence of it in the sentence itself. If it is true, the sentence should say so. What’s needed is something like this:

“Born in 1955 TO A FAMILY OF LITERARY TITANS, Adrian later went on to produce his masterpiece, a book of comic rhymes.”

Or if that’s not the case, you need to separate the two unconnected pieces of information with something neutral like this:

“Adrian was born in 1955, and at the age of twenty-five produced his masterpiece, a book of comic rhymes.”

You could argue that in some ways this kind of mistake is even worse than the dangling modifier because it throws misdirected reasoning into the text. It invites the audience to make an assumption that will either be contradicted immediately, or even worse, will be left unresolved. If you want to get pedantic about this, it fails to meet the requirements of philosopher and linguist Paul Grice’s Maxim of Relevance.

Wow.

Bill Bryson has some wise and pragmatic thoughts to offer on the whole complex issue of dangling modifiers in his fascinating book Troublesome Words. Recommended.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.

 

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