How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (11 page)

3.
STILL WRONG

Certain grammatical mistakes are commonly made in spoken but not written English, and thus won’t be addressed at length in this book. Examples include
ain’t; of
instead of
have
in expressions like
He could of come; them
instead of
those
in expressions like
one of them things;
and regionalisms like
He done wrecked the car.
The one that probably comes up the most—as it’s a feature of many nonstandard dialects, including African-American Vernacular
English—is a transposition of past and participle forms of irregular verbs.

a. Subjunctive

The subjunctive mood has been losing sway in the English language over the centuries, but it’s still got some sway left. Basically, the subjunctive calls for a shift in the verb
to be
in reference to untrue scenarios; the word
if
is usually a giveaway.

Note that if the scenario followed by
if
is not necessarily untrue—that is, if it’s in doubt—the standard past tense is called for, and the subjunctive is hypercorrection.

b. Like (III)

Like
still doesn’t cut the mustard when it’s followed by
in
:

That’s an easy fix, but a comparable misuse of
unlike
is more challenging.

c. (Don’t) Let ’Em Dangle

A similar
like
mistake is:

Again, the fix is to use
as in:

This error is an example of a dangling modifier. Here are some more examples from students’ writing:

The grammatical problem in those sentences (and I apologize if I seem to be stating the obvious) is that
Morgan
didn’t resemble his first trial;
readers
didn’t include the charts;
newspapers
were not the most spectacular event; the eye doesn’t reverse the color scheme;
his comments
were not an expert;
Smith’s lifestyle
didn’t claim to be a simple man;
the bra
doesn’t sit in class or dance at a bar; and the reader’s
breasts
are not pricey. (Pause for snarky comment.) In each case, the italicized word or phrase is the subject of the sentence, and the opening phrase—up to the comma, that is—has to modify, describe, or characterize the subject and nothing but the subject.

To get technical for just a minute, I’ll note that this is a problem only with introductory
phrases
(which do not contain a subject and verb), not
clauses
(which do). So there is no dangler issue in the following:

An interesting thing about danglers is that a rather select group of writers commit them: the minority who would even
attempt
a complex sentence. They haven’t quite mastered the skill of putting one of these together, and thus can get themselves in rather spectacular trouble, but at least they realize that this level of complexity is, as Hamlet said, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Relevant as well is that danglers are very common—and, to a certain extent, acceptable—in speech. When talking, some “mistakes”
are okay. Did you notice that the previous sentence has a dangling modifier (mistakes don’t talk)? In conversation, I bet you wouldn’t. As another example, let’s suppose I’m speaking with someone who’s an expert in ancient religion, and I say: “As an expert in ancient religion, I wonder what you think of devil worship.” That is a dangling modifier: “I” am not a religion expert. In speech, we give this a pass. In writing, we—and by
we
I mean the professors and editors of the world—do not.

That’s unfortunate, because danglers spring incessantly from many writers’ fingers; it takes a substantial amount of discipline and rigor to prune them from our prose. (If you haven’t guessed, I am one of those writers.) Consequently, much more so than the other errors on my list, they show up in well-respected publications, such as the
New York Times Book Review
(
rather than providing the meticulous examination of the process of looking…we are treated to rhetorical flights that provide little perspective of any useful kind
), the
New Yorker
(
A major political donor, his greatest concern is to protect Israel
), and the
Chronicle of Higher Education
(
Having made it successfully through all three gantlets, all of the rejections I experienced along the way have become only vague memories
).

How to avoid danglers? A simple strategy will help you smoke these bad boys out. First of all, you have to recognize sentences that have this structure: MODIFIER-COMMA-SUBJECT-VERB. The vast majority of the time, the part of such a sentence before the comma will either:

• Begin with
  Like, Unlike,
  or
  As
  . (Example:
  Like most of the student body, Rogoff has spent an inordinate amount of time avoiding hard classes.
  )
  
• Contain a gerund, that is, a verb in the
  —ing
  form. (
  Being an inquisitive sort, I wonder what you ate for breakfast.
  )
  
• Begin with the infinitive form of a verb. (
  To maximize your chances of losing weight, you should avoid fried food.
  )
  
• Begin with one or more participles. (
  Shaken and not stirred, James Bond’s martinis are a twentieth-century icon.
  )
  
• Consist of a noun phrase. (
  A popular mayor, Potter is running unopposed for reelection.
  )
  

Once you recognize the sentence, circle the subject, the modifier, and the verb. Then see if it makes sense if you keep all the elements but change the order to this: SUBJECT-COMMA-MODIFIER-COMMA-VERB. If it does—as in all of the examples above—you’re good to go. If it doesn’t, you have a dangler.

So take one of my students’ troubled sentences:

Shifted, it would be:

Obviously no good. There are any number of ways to fix this sentence. Probably the best thing to do is to follow the student’s original instinct and start with the hurricanes. So:

To make matters even more complicated, danglers are sometimes okay.

That sentence is an example of a certain class of opening modifiers, sometimes referred to as
sentence adverbs
, that get a pass when it comes to the whole dangling-modifier question. These are words or phrases that, rather than modify the subject, convey the speaker’s or writer’s attitude, or generally characterize the content of the rest of the sentence. For example:

d. Parallel Universes

The parallelism problem crops up most commonly in lists. You want to make sure that every item is in the same basic form.

In the example above, the phrase
I like to
applies to the first two items in the list, but is mysteriously dropped for the third. As the Beatles once sang, “You can’t do that.” So change to:

Sometimes, you need to just be listless:

The alluring phrase
as well as
creates a parallel problem in 1, below. It’s technically fixed in 2, but the sentence is awkward (a word you will run into again in
Part III
, many times).

e. The Sports Conditional

This isn’t exclusively found in a sports context, but for some reason, athletes, fans, and commentators are unaccountably drawn to the phrase
would have
in considering scenarios that didn’t happen.

The sports conditional seems particularly irresistible when wishing or hoping is involved:

Well, you can’t change a quotation, but if Prendergast were
writing
his sentiments, the correct grammar would be:

Not technically an error, but pretty hackneyed, is “the sports present,” in which athletes and sportswriters recite hypothetic or conditional events in the present tense.

f. Between You and I, This One Bears Some Study

Take a look at this sentence and try to spot the problem word:

It’s the shortest and final one,
I.
Traditional grammar dictates that it should be replaced with
me,
on the principle that prepositions (such as
with
) are followed by the objective (
me
) rather than the subjective case (
I
).