You know what's really fun to edit? Dangling participles. What's a participle? Glad you asked.
What's a Participle?
For example, you might go for a light 15k in your running shoes. Or your sister might be screaming because she burned herself with her curling iron. Make sense?
What's a Participial Phrase?
If you're using a participle as part of a phrase that modifies a sentence, that's called a participial phrase.
Sometimes, participial phrases add to a sentence. For example:
Cracking her gum, Eloise twirled her ponytail around her middle finger, sending a less-than-subtle message to her ex-boyfriend.
The subject of this sentence is Eloise. She's the one cracking her gum and sending a message. With all these participial phrases, we get a vivid picture of Eloise in just a few words.
Even though this works, you want to use participial phrases sparingly. It becomes really distracting to read five or six sentences like this in a paragraph.
What's a Dangling Participle?
The trouble starts when there is a participial phrase with no clear subject. That is called a dangling participle.
These can conjure up some hilarious images when you're editing. For example:
Wishing I was in better shape, my run ended in wheezing and spitting.
What? That doesn't make any sense. The subject that the participial phrase is supposed to be modifying is ambiguous at best and nonexistent at worst.
According to this sentence, my run is wishing I was in better shape.
Now we have a dangling participle.
Think of it this way: the participial phrase is dangling off a cliff unless it has a clear subject that it can find its footing on.
Help Your Participles Find Their Footing
Casual readers may gloss over dangling participles, assuming that I'm the one wishing, not my run. Astute eyes, however, will get hung up on the confusing sentence structure.
Don't leave your participles to dangle and give astute eyes reason to wonder. Double-check your subjects and help your participles find their footing.
Do you have any absurd examples of dangling participles? Share your funny finds with me in the comments.
PRACTICE
You have a character who's running a marathon in a month. Describe their training process using participial phrases, but without leaving any of them to dangle.
When you've written for fifteen minutes, post your practice in the comments and leave notes for your fellow writers.
I hate being first….But I’ll give it a try.
Grabbing his thigh with both hands, John tried to massage away the cramp that had caused him to stop running. As soon as his muscle relaxed, he began a slow running cadence to make sure his leg was alright. After just four or five tentative steps, the muscle tensed into a spasm and cramped again, causing John to stop running and sit on a tree stump.
Sitting along the side of the road, John noticed another runner coming up the street at a leisurely jog. Just as the runner came near, John began to massage his calf and moaned loudly. Seeing John in obvious pain, the runner, a pretty, athletically built young lady, stopped and asked John if he was alright.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.” To himself, John thought, there is nothing wrong with my leg, I was just hoping it would make you stop and talk to me.
Thinking that John was cute, the young woman stopped running and sat with John on the tree stump and asked him if he would be able to run again.
“Sure,” he smiled. “Will you run with me?” Looking directly into her denim-blue eyes, John felt a surge of energy fill him. He stood and stretched his leg, then took a couple of steps before turning to his new companion. “I’ll race you to the corner,” he said and turned and ran off.
Seeing John race ahead of her, the pretty, young runner stood and ran after John, being sure not to catch him and crush his ego. As she followed a discreet distance behind John, the young woman admired how quickly John had recovered from his cramp.
Sorry, Angelo – don’t know why my comment didn’t attach to your thread. Anyway, it is up there somewhere…
I love it! They are both flirting and trying to run at the same time. That could lead to a hilarious story. Thanks Angelo
The participles look good, but remember: alright is all wrong! (It should always be two words: all right.)
Not so. It is alright in this instance. Or a synonym could be used, okay/ fine etc.
Perhaps a new rule then. I’m old enough to have been taught that if a person’s gender was unknown or unspecified, the masculine pronoun should be used. And “men” meant “people.”
Maybe I am walking into a grammar maelstrom, but it my opinion that “Screaming” in “might be screaming” is an intransitive verb preceded by two helping verbs.
You are correct. It should have been “curling” that was italicized in that sentence. The text has been updated to reflect that. Good eye!
Oh boy it’s too early to be training, the sun’s not even up! Nevertheless, it has to be done. I touch my toes, pushing my legs straight. Feel the burn! Birds are trilling in the trees around me. I sniff somebody’s pancakes burning and wish I was inside, about to eat instead of out here in the cold. One leg back and push, now the other. Good lord, how many pancakes are they cooking in there? Are they going to use maple syrup or honey, or macadamia nut butter? Mmmm I love macadamia nut butter, with maple syrup and butter….No, damn you, I am training and that’s it!
I think she will eventually give in, does she? If not she is stronger than most of us.
Remembering his glory days of running as he scanned the dusty trophy case above his desk, Kurt set his jaw and printed off a month-long marathon training schedule. By Jove, he would lace up for that race, earning himself a participation ribbon and a t-shirt if nothing else.
Day one was a booger, and while running uphill and into the wind and through a thunderstorm, Kurt wondered what he was thinking? Losing twenty pounds in a month was not going to happen. His fifty-year old back resisted every mile, a problem he had never encountered as a twenty-something on the race circuit. Those were the days.
“I’m going, I’m going, I’m going,” he chanted with each stride, reinforcing his resolve.
Flipping through his training schedule, Kurt was amazed at how the days had become weeks and the weeks turned into a month. He put his coffee cup in the sink and started stretching at his kitchen counter. Race day was here.
Gathering his supplies, he assumed the start position at the edge of his lawn. Laces, tied. Recliner, flipped open. Legs elevated. ZZ Top playing on the boom box. Sprayer on hose and in one hand, beer in the other. It was noon somewhere. He heard the starting gun pop in the distance, and, sunning himself in the morning light, he waited for the pack to round the corner and head down his street. Good for them for participating; he’d give them a little cool-down on their way past.
Thaks for the laugh Steph … very creative! Loved it …
Ha! Very good. I wondered when he put his coffee cup down if he was supposed to drink coffee just before the race. It shows what kind of control a good writer has when one can change pace right at the end of a story.
Haha – that was funny, Angelo. She was too kind, though. I was cheering for her to whoop his butt at the end 🙂 . You did a great job with the participles. (As far as I can tell, anyway, participles being a bit of a mystery to me.)
There seems to be a glitch in my “Reply” option, but this is to Yvette Carol: Training, pushing, trilling, burning, cooking….I see lots of what appear to my untrained eye to be participles in there. Nice work!
Ana was a novice to running. Retiring early from her job as a kindergarden teacher so that she could write full time, had resulted in Ana’s gaining a huge amount of weight. Chasing children around all day burned an inordinate amount of calories, and Ana sought an exercise that would burn a comparable amount of calories. She decided that running a marathon would do it. In the way that only a writer can avoid the actual doing of a task, she first researched and purchased her equipment. Allowing one hour a day for her exercise program, which included buying equipment, prevented Ana’s running program from progressing rapidly. Buying shoes online was an arduous and time-consuming tasks. Eschewing fancy brands had been an austerity measure of Ana’s for most of her life, and although researching shoes online is cheap paying for them isn’t. It took her almost two weeks to decide on her shoes and buy them. Then she had had to buy running clothes for all seasons in Virginia which was known to have variable weather before global warming raised its ugly head.
Ana would be a great character in a longer piece, Marianne! She’s likeable, yet imperfect. I bet she looks good writing in her running gear 🙂 . I loved how she equated kindergarten teaching with marathon running, too!
Participles, especially hanging ones, are best to avoid in poetry too. Pretty much altogether. Everyone you think you want to use (the -ing words) can be said another way that evokes more of the image you are looking to come up with. 😀
Yeah, I’m pretty disenchanted with participles after reading some of the practice posts. Sounds too much like Yoda. “Hating participles, I am.”
Thinking neither participles nor marathon training are my strong points, I shall refrain from this exercise.
Fearing a repeat of shin splints every time I run, I left the particles to dangle over the road and at least provide some shade to those brave souls sprinting in the rain.
After chopping down a tree with my brother, we both decided to take a beer break.
It is the dawn of another challenging day to Chris. Today is her second day of her training programme. She dreams of her big day and gets her courage ignited. The pain in her legs and the whole body is beyond explanation. Since she had a knee problem she could not continue her regular practices for the last couple of month. The fall could crack her knee but not her courage. She has been trying so hard to fathom her courage by beating the pain. Anyways, today she runs not because of anything else but only because of her will power.
Nature- it is really nice to write about nature as we are a part of it. When I close my
eyes I always feel I am part of it which is inseparable. I feel I get dissolved into it. When my insights go deeper and deeper, nature is at its best. I embrace the feeling of nothingness in it. My thoughts get frozen and I feel the sound of silence. It makes me very calm and give me the pleasure of nothingness. All my worldly burdens fade away
when I am en wrapped by nature.
Awwwwww, dang!!! Another grammar lesson! I am so sure I do this still. Thank you for the article. Very helpful.
Sweeping the sweat from her forehead with a towel, Jessica Roberts sipped some water from the bottle. Her entire body was refusing to carry on, fatigue threatened to overcome her determination. But she knew that she had to move on. This was just the starting. She had a long way to go and she was not among those persons who tend to quit in the middle of the road. So, ignoring the protests from her aching muscles, she took a deep breath and called out,”Jake, I’m ready for the next circuit.”
Jessica or just Jess, as she liked to be called, was not some other fitness freak, who wanted to have a model like figure in 10 days to try on some fancy dresses for the upcoming party. It is not that there is something wrong about wanting a slim figure for the sake of fashion, but Jess’s motivation was far deep rooted than these superficial causes.
She was going to run a marathon in a month. The marathon was organised to spread awareness against obesity. According to WHO’s worldwide estimate, in 2014, more that 1.9 billion adults were overweight and of these over 600 million adults were obese. The dire health consequences were known to people, yet they seldom went for a healthy lifestyle. Jessica’s parents were among them. Her father died of heart attack at a very young age and her mother was a serious patient of osteoarthritis and cardiovascular problems.
Jessica herself was a happily overweight teenager. She practically lived on fast foods and never ever imagined of joining gyms. Why should one pressure one’s body to do those painful things, like running, jogging or other horrible stuffs she had no idea about! It was much easier to enjoy spicy foods and chill out on your bed!
But everything changed with her father’s death. She was a daddy’s girl and losing her father in a preventable health problem knocked the breath out of her lungs. It made her think anew. Her mother was almost bedridden at that time and she had to get some job and face the real world. She wanted to lock herself in her bedroom and cry her eyes out for the rest of her life. She met Jake at that very phase of her life. Jake was a personal trainer at a gym and with his help a new Jess was born. A more healthy, more strong, more confident Jess, whose goal was to motivate people to stay fit, so that no other Jessica in the country would lose a dear one in this preventable epidemic, called obesity.
She had to run this marathon. There was no way she was quitting now. Mentally glaring at her body, she continued to push it to its limits. Her sports attire was drenched in sweat, her face red with brutal physical training, every inch of her body was crying out loud. But she moved on, whispering under her breath, “Only a few more days, daddy. Then your little girl will run her first marathon. Can you imagine daddy, your little chubby lazy Jess, running a marathon! But then, its all for you, dad. I love you.”