How misused modifiers can hurt your writing - Emma Bryce

Modifiers are words, phrases, and clauses that add information about other parts of a sentence—which is usually helpful. But when modifiers aren’t linked clearly enough to the words they’re actually referring to, they can create unintentional ambiguity. Emma Bryce navigates the sticky world of misplaced, dangling and squinting modifiers.

Lesson by Emma Bryce, animation by Karrot Animation.

[txvoltaire]

After being in the attic for 5 years, Grandpa finally fixed the broken chair!

[theclipreaper]

The animator really loves drawing cute buffalos

[LegendaryTreecko]

Upon seeing the first headline, I thought it meant the chocolate bunny assisted the thief in robbing the town.

[dontwatchtheworldburn]

It's the buffaloing buffalo from Buffalo!

[AnotherGradus]

I suppose Freud would say: _"Sometimes a pixelated arrow is just a pixelated arrow."_

[rhys]

In particular, news headlines can look like that because in journalistic writing, you tend to avoid the passive voice. I can almost guarantee that if I gave that first modified headline, "Town with world's largest chocolate bunny robbed by thief", to my editor, she'd hand it back and tell me to make it active again.

[storn]

2:35 Chocolate bunny-thieving robbers rapidly attract... That made me laugh. This was supposed to correct the mistake, but it created another one: are the robbers made of chocolate or the bunnies?

[sleepy]

"police found safe under bed"

[dragonridley]

"Twins reunited after 18 years in checkout line."

[Altrantis]

I'm pretty sure they make the headlines ambiguous on purpose to make the reder wonder and actually read.

[ShawnRavenfire]

Judging by the arrows, the modifiers aren't the only things dangling.

[harstar]

Ambiguous arrows are suspiciously shaped.

[saanvimuralia]

I love how they added an obvious reference to one of their other videos on lexical ambiguity. It had buffalo too. (and the beautiful animation)

[sandraekhoff]

I have fun watching this video. The narrator is very engaging, DRAMATIC and funny, I love it, love it. The video was very helpful and simple to understand.Thank you so much, very well done!!!

[Darktrooper]

"I shot an elephant in my pajamas."

[ea-lhgh]

Love the animation! It made the whole concept more emphasized.

[prasoonshrestha]

This is used as a clickbait in youtube video descriptions by giving a double meaning to the title. Thanx a lot! Good info vid.

[philipcheung]

These are very common grammar issues. Good review on using fixing modifiers.

[mikapinky]

I love these grammar videos! Keep making them!

[yujiezhou]

Or do it like analytical languages like modern vernacular Chinese where modifiers, both adverbial and adjective, have regular and expected places that are just right before the verb and the noun to be modified respectively, the downside of which is that you have no way to use adjective clauses after a noun, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to write in Chinese long sentences like this one or those in German in a relatively clear and unambiguous way.