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🏈 Who’s refereeing dangling modifiers during football season?
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Football season is nearly upon us, with the NFL wrapping up its preseason games this weekend. To celebrate, we're resharing one of the first editions of this newsletter, in which we weave together football and grammar. Enjoy! NFL referees may know the rules of football, but they clearly need to up their grammar game. If you’re a football fan, you’re likely familiar with the phrase, “After reviewing the play, the ruling on the field stands.” And if you’re not, we’ll catch you up: When NFL referees watch replay video to determine whether a judgment about the result of a play was correct, they make an announcement afterward about the final decision. If they agree with the original call, they often say, “After reviewing the play, the ruling on the field stands.” This is a high-profile example of what’s known as a dangling modifier, which is when a sentence begins with an adjectival modifier but the subject of that modifier is misplaced in the sentence or simply isn't there at all. In our NFL example, it’s not there, and here’s what the refs could say if they wanted to stick to the English language playbook: The trick to fixing this mistake is to watch for introductory clauses in sentences that don’t have a subject. For example, “Driving through the countryside, there were lots of farms.” Then, make sure the subject that you are modifying immediately follows the comma: “Driving through the countryside, we saw lots of farms.” Reading this newsletter, you learned something (we hope). What’s another common example of a dangling modifier? Hit reply and share it with us.
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Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
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