MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Oops! Dangling modifiers again rear their ugly heads in the news

It’s been quite a while now since I came across a perilously dangling modifying phrase in the lead sentence of a news or feature story, but today (November 27, 2011), I found one highly instructive example each in two of Metro Manila’s major broadsheets.

1. The Manila Times: Dangling front-end prepositional phrase

By definition, a dangling modifying phrase is a phrase that doesn’t seem to have a syntactic relation to the rest of the sentence. This is clearly the case with the prepositional phrase “of the countless tubes, bottles and pots of personal care products in the market today” in the lead sentence above. That phrase is obviously meant to modify some word or phrase in the main clause of that sentence, but it fails to do the job because it just couldn’t latch on or logically connect to that word or phrase. Indeed, in that front-end position, that phrase can’t modify the noun “study” even if this word seems to be its likely logical subject, and neither can it logically modify any of the several nouns that come after it in the sentence (“group,” “Campaign for Safe Cosmetics,” “women,” “products,” “men”). So what gives?

From the looks of it, being introduced by the preposition “of” started that phrase on the wrong foot, so to speak, causing the very serious grammatical rigmarole. Logically, an “of”-phrase like that should modify a noun more specific than any of the classes of nouns enumerated in that modifying phrase, as in “Of the countless artifacts and inventions made by mankind, the smart phone was recently adjudged by a panel of experts as the most ingenious and useful.” In short, the subject modified by an “of”-phrase must be a concrete, specific example of the items enumerated in that noun phrase. Evidently, however, the sentence in question here is not of that type, for its main clause has a subject of an entirely different kind—“a study.”   

Let’s try this seemingly sensible solution: take out that modifying phrase from the front-end of the sentence and position it right after the subject “study” of the main clause, as follows:

“A study of the countless tubes, bottles and pots of personal care products in the market today by the international group Campaign for Safe Cosmetics found that on the average, women use 12 products a day, while men use about six.”

Mmm… That looks like a grammatically airtight reconstruction that makes sense and reads passably well. My only misgiving about it is that the subject of the sentence is an overly long noun phrase—“a study of the countless tubes, bottles and pots of personal care products in the market today by the international group Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.” This noun phrase creates a 25-word gap between the head noun “study” and the operative verb “found,” thus unduly delaying the appearance of that verb in the sentence. We must keep in mind that a sentence begins to make sense only after its operative gets written or said; when that appearance or mention of the verb is inordinately delayed, the readability of the sentence suffers.    

So, for greater clarity, I propose not only to get rid of the dangler but also allow for an earlier appearance of that verb:

“From a study of the countless tubes, bottles and pots of personal care products in the market today, the international group Campaign for Safe Cosmetics found that on the average, women use 12 products a day, while men use about six.”

I think everybody will agree that this is a much better and clearer version. This time, we have an 18-word prepositional phrase that meaningfully and much more readably connects to the main clause.

Before closing this grammar analysis, I must also point out that the second sentence of that lead passage can stand great improvement in terms of conciseness, organization, and parallel construction:

“This information translates to the fact some 200 different chemicals end up on a woman’s body on a daily basis, and 85 for men.”

The phrase “this information translates to the fact” is verbose and sounds rather iffy, while the construction of the comparative between the chemicals that end up on a woman’s body and on a man’s body is grammatically disjointed and unparallel.

Here’s my suggested rewrite of that sentence:

“This means that on a daily basis, some 200 different chemicals end up on a woman’s body, 85 on a man’s body.”

2. Manila Bulletin: Dangling modifying phrase with a nonexistent subject

The second sentence of the lead passage above has a dangling modifying phrase of an altogether different kind—one with a nonexistent subject to modify. Worse, it has a passive-voice main clause with nobody or nothing doing the action.

Let’s examine the sentence closely:

“Having been a regular attendee during the past years, expectations seemed to be so high with its new venue.”

There’s absolutely no noun in that sentence that could function as its subject. It’s not specified who has been a regular attendee, and it isn’t clear either whose expectations are being described in the main clause.

As an editor, I know that an abstruse sentence construction like this often results from a writer’s innate aversion to using the first person “I.” This misguided notion is inflicted on students by English grammar teachers who preach that writing in the first person “I” is self-centered and undesirable. Those who get hooked by this notion often end up writing in all-passive-voice sentences all their life because, well, the passive voice is the only way they can totally avoid using “I” in their written English.

So how do we get rid of the dangler in that utterly confusing sentence and supply it with a doer of the action besides?

Here’s my suggestion:

“I have regularly attended that event over the years, so I had very high expectations of it in the new venue.”

I must also add here that the third sentence of that story’s lead paragraph suffers from the ill-advised mixing of the second-person pronoun “your” and third-person substitute pronoun “oneself.” Take a look:  

“Wine experience is truly a great evening to be in, no matter the mood is – ‘joyful’ mood to celebrate the occasion, eager and fit to drink your sorrows away, or excited to go plunge and drown oneself in a wide variety of wines presented from the great regions of the world.”

Good grammar requires the writer to use only one person and to be consistent with it:

Consistently second-person:
“Wine experience is truly a great evening to be in, no matter the mood is – ‘joyful’ mood to celebrate the occasion, eager and fit to drink your sorrows away, or excited to go plunge and drown yourself in a wide variety of wines presented from the great regions of the world.”

Or consistently substitute third-person:
“Wine experience is truly a great evening to be in, no matter the mood is – ‘joyful’ mood to celebrate the occasion, eager and fit to drink one’s sorrows away, or excited to go plunge and drown oneself in a wide variety of wines presented from the great regions of the world.”

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

1. Manila Bulletin: Misuse of the adjective “different” for the adjective “various”

In the lead sentence above, I have serious misgivings about the use of the adjective “different” in the phrase “in different countries including the Philippines.” I know that not a few newspaper journalists habitually use “different” in such phrases, thinking that it’s synonymous with “various,” but I don’t think they are synonymous at all. The sense of the adjective “different” is that of “distinct” or “not the same,” which emphasizes the dissimilarity or unlikeness between entities grouped together. This sense is definitely not the same as that of a similarity in characteristic or commonality of attribute denoted by “some,” “several,” “a number,” or “an indefinite number greater than one”—which, of course, is precisely the sense of the adjective “various.”

So then, it stands to reason and good semantics that “various” instead of “different” be used in that lead sentence, as follows:

“Math experts from the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Canada and other countries launched a new world-class math assessment test to develop and measure students’ performance in various countries including the Philippines.”

2. Philippine Daily Inquirer: Subject-verb disagreement error twice in a row

I thought of ignoring the subject-verb disagreement error in the lead sentence above—“repairs…is expected to be finished”—as just due to writing or editing oversight, but I changed my mind when I found precisely the same subject-verb disagreement error not long after in the next sentence—“the materials used…was substandard.” This seems to me a clear indication that both the reporter and desk editor who handled the story need to review the application of the subject-verb agreement rule for noun phrases, which provides that it’s the number of the head noun in a nominal group—a noun phrase of so many words—that determines whether the operative verb should take the singular or plural form (“How the mass media can lick errors in subject-verb agreement for good”), as follows:

“The controversial repairs of the Buendia flyover resumed yesterday and are expected to be finished next month, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) said yesterday.

In a statement, the DPWH said the repairs, which were halted in October after it was discovered that the materials used by the contractor were substandard, were expected to be finished on Dec. 15.”

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