Grammar Tip: Recognizing and Dealing With Dangling Participles or “Walking down the street, the store was closed.”

By Jerry Karp

Question: The sentence below doesn't seem quite right. Is there really anything really wrong with it?

Looking for the turnoff to my cousin's country mansion, the dense fog made things difficult for us.

Answer: Yes, we do have a problem here. This is your basic “dangling participle.” That's one of those mysterious sounding grammar terms, I know, but the concept isn't really that complicated.

Basically, the phrase “Looking for the turnoff to my cousin's country house,” is a present participle phrase. Don't worry about the terminology. Call it an “ing” phrase if you like. The important thing to remember is that “ing” phrases are always attached to sentences (i.e., “[T]he dense fog made things difficult for us.”)

OK, here's the rule: The “ing” phrase always refers to the subject of the sentence it's attached to. In this case, the subject of the sentence is “fog.” So, grammatically speaking, our sentence tells us that the “dense fog” was “looking for the turnoff to my cousin's house.”

Happily, this one's easy to fix, once you spot it. All you have to do is rewrite the main sentence a little so the subject fits the “ing” phrase. Maybe like this:

Looking for the turnoff to my cousin's country house, we found that the dense fog was making things difficult for us.

Now, “Looking for the turnoff . . . ” refers to “we” (the subject of the rewritten sentence).

By the way, those phrases come in “ed” versions, too:

Locked in the basement, the darkness scared my little brother.
It wasn't “the darkness” that was “locked in the basement,” so instead we'll say:

Locked in the basement, my brother became frightened by the darkness.

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