More About Grammar

MORE ABOUT GRAMMAR

Today I’m continuing my little series about grammar, focusing on passive voice and the dangling modifier/participle. Passive voice causes a great deal of angst among writers, me included, but it doesn’t have to. A dangling modifier/participle can destroy the mood of a piece or cause the pleated brow of bewilderment on the face of the reader – not an ideal outcome for the writer.

I’ll begin with passive voice, which is a bit of a bogeyman for writers. It’s hard to pick up on, and can cause your writing to lose momentum. 

Active voice is when the subject does the action stated by the verb: ‘She wrote a nasty review.’

In passive voice the subject is not active - ‘she wrote’ - but is being acted upon: ‘A nasty review was written.’

Active voice is more direct; sentences written in active voice are generally smoother and more easily understood. ‘The writer decided to eliminate all passive voice from his manuscript’.

Compare that with passive voice: ‘It was decided by the writer that all passive voice in his manuscript should be eliminated’.

However, passive voice is not always a bad thing. Passive voice is used when it is not necessary to know who or what caused the action. It is also used when the perpetrator is unknown. ‘My car has been stolen!’ – I do not at this point know who stole my car, only that it is gone. 

‘Nasty reviews are depressing.’ Who cares who left the reviews, I’m depressed. 

Passive voice is also useful when you don’t want to reveal who did it, or do not want to point the finger of blame. ‘The nasty review has been posted on Facebook.’

There’s a perfect way to identify passive voice which I read about some time ago. It pops up in internet searches and now and then on social media because it is so easy. To identify passive voice in your writing, add ‘by zombies’ after the verb. ‘The nasty review has been posted by zombies on Facebook’, ‘A nasty review was written by zombies’. Sadly, it does not always work, but it will help in removing most unintentional or unnecessary use of passive voice.

So what about dangling modifier/participles? A modifier is an adjective, adverb, phrase or clause that helps to describe a word or make its meaning clearer. A participle word, or phrase, can also be a modifier. You don’t need to be able to identify whether the modifier is a participle, adjective, adverb or phrase. If you are left scratching your head in confusion as to who did what, it’s likely that a modifier has been put in the wrong place.

If the modifier is used in a sentence, but the word it is to modify is not, it is left dangling with no job to perform: ‘Having read the nasty review, the book will be rewritten.’

In this case it is not clear who read the review. Change to: ‘Having read the nasty review, I decided to rewrite the book.’aH This makes it clear that I am the one who read the review.

Or, if the modifier is used in the wrong part of a sentence – a misplaced modifier - it can be unclear which thing it is meant to modify: ‘Being depressed, the nasty review made me rethink my writing style.’ Obviously the nasty review can’t be depressed.

But if you change it to: ‘At first I was depressed by the nasty review, but it had the effect of making me rethink my writing style’ or ‘The depressing tone of the nasty review made me rethink my writing style,’ it becomes clear I was the one depressed by the nasty review and the review itself does not care one way or the other.

Dangling modifiers are all too easy to miss, because as the author you read what you expect to read, which is not always what you actually wrote. You know what you were thinking, the reader doesn’t. Dangling modifiers are harder to spot than misplaced modifiers, but I have read some fantastic books that have dangling modifiers. The problem with dangling and misplaced modifiers is that they break the spell the author is weaving, bringing the reader back to the real world. You don’t want this to happen. You want your reader to live in the pages of your book, not to be puzzling about your meaning.

There are some pretty funny misplaced modifiers, a quick Google search will reward you with loads of webpages devoted to them. Here are a few, picked up from EddieSnipes.com:

• While camping, I saw a bear in my pyjamas.

• The woman walked the dog in purple suede cowboy boots.

• Don’t try to pat the dog on the porch that is growling.

• Covered with hot melted cheese, we ate the pizza.

• The sweater belongs to my best friend that has a V-shaped neck. (This one at least uses the correct grammar, if the writer truly meant the sweater had the V-shaped neck that is. If the best friend had the V-shaped neck the correct word would have been ‘who’ not ‘that’.)

When I’m reading I am more likely to be distracted out of a story by a dangling modifier or incorrect grammar: 'that’ when it should be ‘she’, ‘of’ instead of ‘have’, ‘and’ instead of ‘to’). Passive voice does not usually jar that much, unless the entire story is written in passive voice, in which case I’m probably not reading it at all.

So how do you find dangling modifiers and fix those errors?

One of the reasons writers are told to put a completed manuscript aside for at least two weeks before editing is that you come to it with fresh eyes. In the writing and editing process you become so familiar with your own work that you miss a lot of errors. When you read it after a rest it can seem like someone else’s writing, and you are far more likely to pick up those little typos and grammatical errors. That’s when you will see the dangling modifiers - when you read a sentence you wrote and go “huh, what did I say?”

Everybody has different writing and editing styles, and you have to experiment until you find what works best for you. For me, I start my writing day by editing what I wrote the day before.  It gets me back into the story, and when I complete the manuscript I have already done several edits. However I still put it to one side and leave it alone for a couple of weeks before doing a major edit and cull. That’s when I pick up issues and plot holes and slow bits, which can be due to passive voice.

Beta readers are brilliant at finding errors, plot holes and other editing issues, so don’t be afraid to use them. Some people advocate reading your manuscript aloud as a way of picking up errors. It doesn’t work for me because I zone out and realise I’ve read several thousand words without listening to a word I say! But it does work for a lot of people so give it a try.

As I’ve said before, even if you use an editor you should still edit your own work as thoroughly as you can. Editors are not infallible; some of those books I read that had dangling modifiers were traditionally published. You’ve put the hours and love into your manuscript, you should polish it to the best of your ability – you and your manuscript deserve it.