Steven Pinker: These Are the Grammar Rules You Don't Need to Follow

blacbird said:

It ain't.

caw

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Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Excellent!

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

Kylabelle said:

Oh good, we get to argue about dangling modifiers.

I'd love some examples of dangling modifiers that improve the sentence. Because maybe he's right. There are plenty of rules I enjoy breaking, but that one has always seemed pretty sturdy and useful to me. But I'd love to add to my collection.

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Oh geez, I ran across one in my reading the other day. It was a dangling modifier, but I only realized it because I'm a grammar geek. It wasn't confusing, because of the context (interpreting it literally would have made no sense), and it really wouldn't have flowed as well if the sentence had been restructured so the participle clause was adjacent to the noun it modified.

I assume that's why the editor left it in.

And darn, I can't remember where it was now!

But in general, dangly bits are best left unmodified.

Roxxsmom said:

But in general, dangly bits are best left unmodified.

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In general, danglers are among the most easily fixed of grammatical things, without extra verbiage or much in the way of sentence reconstruction.

I hate 'em. As Mark Twain said, they "most give me the phantods."

I teach Composition. My experience is that students who write using danglers, also succumb to all manner of other grammatical misconstructions, all of which contribute to vague, unclear writing that doesn't convey the meaning they really want. I score papers numerically in several categories. Two of these are Clarity (do I understand it?) and Precision (are the words used with precise meaning?). A final category is Effectiveness. Obviously this is a judgment call, but that's why the university pays me the big bucks. Clarity and Precision go a long way toward communicating to my reading experience Effectively.

Pinker's example, encountered even once, would knock a point off the "Clarity" score, for certain. And it's so damn easily fixed.

caw

Roxxsmom said:

Oh geez, I ran across one in my reading the other day. It was a dangling modifier, but I only realized it because I'm a grammar geek. It wasn't confusing, because of the context (interpreting it literally would have made no sense), and it really wouldn't have flowed as well if the sentence had been restructured so the participle clause was adjacent to the noun it modified.

I assume that's why the editor left it in.

And darn, I can't remember where it was now!

But in general, dangly bits are best left unmodified.

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Darn!

If you run across it again, or remember where you saw it, I would really love to see it.