Sheets don’t sleep. That’s why this sentence is a classic example of a dangling participle. A dangling participle is just one type of dangling modifier or, more simply, dangler.

Sheets don't sleep. That's why this sentence is a classic example of a dangling participle. A dangling participle is just one type of dangling modifier or, more simply, dangler.

When he was teaching journalism, he found that the dangling modifier was the most common grammar mistake he encountered. Fortunately, most danglers are easily fixed.

During a visit to the Edinburgh Zoo, Geoff Pullum figures out the source of a remarkable piece of erroneous grammar advice that mistakes verbless clausal dangling modifiers for passive clauses.

Consider, though, that James Donaldson, who provides this example in his recent doctoral dissertation, also cites 21 dangling modifiers from a rather more critically admired source: Virginia Woolf.

One mistake many make in this regard is courting dangling modifiers. These are modifiers so loosely put in sentences that you do not know which parts of the structures they are working with.

*Ms Modra says a dangling modifier is when one confuses subject and object, writing for example, ‘having run to the the station, the train was 20 minutes late’, and making it look like the ...

The FT’s counter-suggestion was an upmarket example of what grammarians call the “dangling modifier” or “unattached participle”, in which the start of a sentence loses touch with the end.