Editing Principle 23: Dangling Participles Are Grammatically Incorrect But Mostly (and Worse) They’re Boring
I do not use much technical terminology when working with clients because talk of past perfect tenses and hyphenated compound adjectives makes most people reach for their smartphones. “Dangling participle” is one term I do try to slip into conversation, however. It’s such a common mistake, made by extremely erudite people and their dimmer cousins in roughly equal frequencies, in spoken and in written text, and so the question has nagged at me for ages: Why do so many people trip on this grammatical wire?
Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook has some great examples of dangling participles:
“Although watched by 25.8 million viewers, the program’s ratings disappointed the advertisers.”
Because it was the program itself that had 25.8 million viewers, and not the ratings, as Einsohn points out, the sentence should read:
“Although the program was watched by 25.8 million viewers, the ratings disappointed the advertisers.”
(Honestly, I don’t even like the “was watched” coupled with “viewers” or depriving advertisers of agency. How about, “Although the program was seen by 25.8 million viewers, advertisers weren’t satisfied”? But that’s fodder for another post.)
Here’s another example, stealthier and more insidious:
“Despite the constant claims that we need more economic growth, there are limits on what growth can do for us.”
The problem with this sentence is that the “limits on what economic growth can do for us” exist entirely independently from “the constant claims that we need more growth.” Those limits on growth would be — in the world, real and palpable — even if there were no constant clamoring for growth. They are real but they don’t have ears. Yet here they’re arranged in an implied dialogue.
This might seem like pedantic quibbling. So what, someone might say; the point is clear enough. That “despite” is a real problem, though. Despite means “in spite of” or “without being affected by,” and thus the clause it kicks off must be modifying something that — logic dictates — can be affected. And there is no such thing in this sentence aside from “us.”
What or who could conceivably be affected? Who could do something despite something? Individuals, pundits, television talking heads. In fact, the sentence is so much more interesting corrected than it is flawed, because correcting it requires that we get specific, say who is doing what, perhaps even name names, maybe throw a punch that lands:
“There are limits to what economic growth can do for us, though you would not know it from Joe Blow’s constant clamoring for more.”
or
“Those who routinely claim that we need more economic growth ignore the brute fact that there are limits to what growth can do.”
or
“Claims that economic growth will solve our problems are made in willful defiance of the truth that economic growth can only accomplish so much.”
I realize now that I haven’t answered my original question of why so many people trip up on dangling participles. I don’t have an answer, unfortunately, but I suspect it’s because we like starting sentences with dependent clauses (whether we know that term or not), and think it makes us sound smart (which it can), but then we unconsciously shy away from our full intended meaning.
*The Copyeditor’s Handbook, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
