The term modifier refers to a general category of words, phrases, or clauses that describe, or modify, another word or group of words within a sentence. In the following examples, the modifier is underlined and word(s) it describes is in bold.
Examples:
- His students rarely miss his lectures.
- The law tries to protect wildlife in the area.
- This is the town where Hemingway lived.
There are two common errors that students make with modifiers:
Misplaced Modifiers
Look at the following examples. Where are the modifiers? What are they trying to describe?
- She wore a hat on her head which was much too big.
- The students had almost read the whole novel by the end of the week
- Crawling up my friend's leg, I saw a large cockroach.
If a modifier is not close enough to the part of the sentence that it is modifying, it can affect or confuse and meaning of your sentence. This is an issue of word order, and it is called a misplaced modifier. Fortunately, it is easy to fix.
Corrected
- She wore a hat on her head which was much too big.✘
- On her head, she wore a hat which was much too big.✔
- The students had almost read the whole novel by the end of the week.✘
- The students had read almost the whole novel by the end of the week.✔
- Crawling up my friend's leg, I saw a large cockroach.✘
- I saw a large cockroach crawling up my friend's leg.✔
Dangling Modifiers
Try to find the error in the following example:
- After serving four years in the military, civilian life seemed dull.
The above example contains the dangling modifier, which is more complicated than a word order issue. The modifying phrase "after serving four years in the military" cannot modify "civilian life". Therefore, it has nothing to modify and is considered dangling.
Corrected
- After serving four years in the military, civilian life seemed dull.✘
- After serving four years in the military, the soldier found civilian life dull.✔
To avoid these problems, be sure that all of your modifiers have something to modify and that they are as close as possible to the thing they are modifying.
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