Dangling Modifiers: An Explanation and Guide for Editing

Aug 1

You don’t want danglers in your writing!

What do editors mean when they talk about danglers? This is a term for dangling modifiers, or words/phrases mistakenly associated with the wrong word in a sentence. Danglers are usually considered grammatically incorrect and make your writing sound confusing, unclear, and misleading. AI grammar checkers often miss this type of mistake because the error comes from the meaning of the sentence rather than the construction.

Let’s look at some examples and then talk about how to correct them.

Grabbing her coat, the door shut with a bang behind her.

The door grabbed her coat?

Having pulled the turkey out of the oven, the dinner was ready to begin.

The dinner pulled the turkey out of the oven?

At age eight, my family moved to Austin.

The whole family was eight years old?

As you can see, the dangler is often a participle without a subject (“grabbing her coat”). The modifier needs to connect with the subject of the main clause of the sentence (which, in that example, is “the door”). It becomes a dangling modifier when it tries to modify the object of the sentence or some other implied character/concept. Simply put, make sure these kinds of clauses are always referring to the main subject of the sentence.

There are three main ways to tackle danglers: Change the main subject of the sentence, change the modifier into some type of subordinate clause, or combine the ideas so they create just one independent clause. Splitting the concepts into two sentences may work in some cases too. You’ll need to play around with these options to find the correction that stays true to the original meaning and voice.

Change the subject:

Grabbing her coat, she left the room and shut the door with a bang behind her.

This works pretty well, but it changes the feeling of the sentence to specify that she is shutting the door.

Having pulled the turkey out of the oven, I was ready to start the dinner.

This is good, but this rewrite gives the speaker more agency than they had in the original sentence. It may not be appropriate for the context.

At age eight, I moved to Austin with my family.

This works, but it may change the feeling of the sentence too much.

Change the modifier:

She grabbed her coat, and the door shut with a bang behind her.

This feels very true to the original sentence. If the timeline is too choppy, this could be split into two sentences.

I pulled the turkey out of the oven; the dinner was ready to begin.

This works well and keeps the feeling of the original sentence.

When I was eight, my family moved to Austin.

This is a great way to fix this sentence. You could also flip the order of the sentence and get rid of the comma: “My family moved to Austin when I was eight.”

Combine the two clauses:

She grabbed her coat and shut the door with a bang behind her.

This is a great way to fix this sentence, but it changes the feeling of the sentence to specify that she is shutting the door.

I pulled the turkey out of the oven and called everyone to the table for dinner.

This may be changing the meaning of the sentence too much, but it adds detail that helps the reader visualize the scene.

I moved to Austin at age eight.

This reads well but changes the feeling of the sentence.

There are endless ways to correct dangling modifiers, but this gives you a launching point to identify the best rewrite for your story.

Keep in mind that danglers have made their way into some of the most widely read works of great literature. Virginia Woolf wrote “Lying awake, the floor creaked” in Mrs Dalloway. If you were Virginia Woolf’s copyeditor, would you have changed that sentence to “She was lying awake when the floor creaked”? In Richard II, Shakespeare penned:

As in a theatre, the eyes of men,

After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,

Are idly bent on him that enters next,

Thinking his prattle to be tedious.

The eyes of men don’t think—the men do!

My advice, when it comes to fiction, is to always put the reading experience first. Danglers are known to obfuscate the meaning of a sentence and should therefore be avoided. Now that we’ve learned how to edit danglers without losing the meaning and feeling of the original sentence, you have a new skill for your self-editing toolkit.