How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem by Ben Yagoda Page B

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:
    [
Being the most spectacular event of the year, newspapers devoted major coverage to the hurricane.
]
    Shifted, it would be:
    [
Newspapers, being the most spectacular event of the year, devoted major coverage to the hurricane.
]
    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:
    The hurricane was the most spectacular event of the year, and newspapers devoted major coverage to it.
    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:
    Fortunately, the game will go on as scheduled.
    To be perfectly honest, that course is pure hogwash.
    Summing up this section, it’s pretty easy to spot a dangling modifier.
    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.
    [
I like to hike, play disk golf, and just goofing off.
]
    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:
    I like hiking, playing disk golf, and just goofing off.
    Sometimes, you need to just be listless:
    [
He has experience in copyediting, graphics, and has won two professional awards.
]
    He has experience in copyediting and graphics, and has won two professional awards.
    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).
    1. [
World AIDS Day is devoted to spreading further awareness of HIV and AIDS, as well as a time of remembrance for the millions who have died because of the virus.
]
    2. [
World AIDS Day is devoted to spreading further awareness of HIV and AIDS and is a time of remembrance for the millions who have died because of the virus.
]
    3.
World AIDS Day is devoted to spreading further awareness of HIV and AIDS. It’s a time of remembrance for the millions who have died because of the virus.
    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.
    [
If Johnson would have caught that ball, the Bisons would have won the game.
]
    If Johnson had caught the ball, the Bisons would have won the game.
    The sports conditional seems particularly irresistible when wishing or hoping is involved:
    “I wish I would have took a swing at that ball,” Prendergast said.
    Well, you can’t change a quotation, but if Prendergast were
writing
his sentiments, the correct grammar would be:
    I wish I had taken a swing at that ball.
    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.
    [
If he makes that interception, the whole game changes.
]
    If he had made that interception, the whole game would have changed.
    f. Between You and I, This One Bears Some Study
    Take a look at this sentence and try to spot the problem word:
    [
It would be great if you could come to the concert with my wife and I.
]
    It’s the shortest and final one,
I.
Traditional grammar dictates that it should be replaced with
me,
on the