AWC Blog

'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchards, a serpent stung me’
(Hamlet 1.5.35-6)

These are the words of Hamlet’s father; what he says is grammatically wrong. The serpent did not sleep in the orchard; the king did. Shall we invite the Shakespeare’s ghost to attend the Academic Writing Centre?

A misplaced or ‘dangling’ participle is one of the most common writing errors. It may be found lurking in an otherwise excellent article or essay. It makes others laugh at your expense or lower your grades. It changes the meaning of your sentences and can turn tragedy into nonsense. Imagine for instance, if a journalist reporting a horrible accident involving an English professor wrote the following:

Sitting on the bank of the Nile and reading a book, a gigantic crocodile suddenly leaped out and ate the professor.

Now, nearly every book, on-line manual, or blog on grammar features an entry on dangling participles. The Grammar Girl article, for instance, explains that a participle is ‘a verb that acts like an adjective’. Participial phrases are ‘phrases that contain a participle and modify the subject of the sentence’. As the author puts it, ‘when you dangle a participle, it means your participial phrase is hanging there in your sentence with no proper subject in sight’. So you can get the following ridiculous sentences:

Walking through the town, the shop appeared on the right.
or 
Chattering, screaming, and running around, the teacher thought the children could do with a break.

Now, it is relatively easy to spot the errors in the above sentence: crocodiles do not read books; shops do not walk through town; and teachers do not (normally) scream and run around. Less funny and more frequent are sentences that refuse to separate a writer and his life or a war and its date:

Suffering from TB, Keats’s life was one of struggle. 
or
Emerging out of a financial crisis, that month marked the start of the war.

But why do people make these mistakes?
One reason is that participles, or rather participial phrases, have no fixed position in the normal word order of the English sentence. We can say:

Eating a sandwich, John walked down the street.
or 
John walked down the street, eating a sandwich 
or
John, eating a sandwich, walked down the street.

All three sentences are grammatically correct. In all three cases the participial phrase gives information about John. Perhaps this movability of the phrase may be responsible for the fact that it is often left dangling, without a subject to modify. This is the view of Gleanth Brooks and R.P. Warren whose Modern Rhetoric provides a detailed discussion of modifiers that is superior to most on-line sources.

However, this still does not answer the question why the spectre of Hamlet’s father made an error. Is it because his world of confusion and crisis where there seems to be no more time for grammar or correct speech? After all, this is a world where Philosophy students, like Hamlet, are forced to dedicate his life to more practical matters (as often happens when a country is in a crisis) of revenge and general bloodshed. 
Perhaps, but I still think he should visit the Academic Writing Centre.

Works cited:
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/dangling-participles.aspx
Brooks, Gleanth and R.P. Warren. Modern Rhetoric. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1961.

Academic Writing Centre

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