ONE OF THE BEST ARGUMENTS for becoming technically agile with your written English is the participial phrase. Why? It’s probably the most powerful tool at your command for writing with clarity, subtlety, richness of detail, depth, and significant meaning.
But you’d better deploy it properly, otherwise, you risk causing confusion and boredom in the average reader–and rejection from the professional.
What’s a participial phrase? Nothing more, really, than, a participle (verb form ending in -ing or -ed) plus some other words or phrases to give it flesh. But it’s what it does that’s so powerful.
Check out these examples–the bolded phrases are all participial phrases:
• Having fully prepared for the meeting, Jane had no trouble making her view prevail.
• Watching Ellen move several boatloads of her stuff into his apartment, Jim realized this was the biggest mistake he had ever made.
• Having wandered in the desert for a month, Juan was unaware that war had broken out.
Because participial phrases: are so powerful–so full of modifying information, writers make good use of them to enrich context economically and powerfully. But it’s easy to over-use them, and that’s a mistake that, should you make it, will brand you as at best an unwitting novice, or at worst, clueless and insensitive to the basic tools of your art.
The truth is that abuse of participial phrases: can sandbag your entire writing effort, sometimes even causing unintended hilarity. Here are a few of cautionary examples to show why overloading a sentence with them is bad in all kinds of ways:
• She loved her garden, overflowing with plants from friends and family, knowing a plant was the perfect gift for her.
What’s wrong: The first clause is a “dangling participle” aka dangling modifier – it wants to modify “she” but is trapped grammatically into modifying either “she” or “her garden,” take your pick–which is an absurdity. The second compounds the problem: who knows the plant was the perfect gift? She? The garden? Friends and family?
• Driving to the football game, he was late for the kickoff.
What’s wrong: Was he late for the kickoff WHILE driving to the game? Of course not. He was late WHEN HE ARRIVED. Time frame fail!
• Having grown up poor and received a scholarship for his basketball skills, Jared did well enough to graduate early, his coaches trying to get him to stay on as a graduate student.
What’s wrong: The first clause piggybacks growing up poor and earning a basketball scholarship. There’s the power of the participial phrase in a nutshell: it’s a neat compressed summary that really works–yet it pushes the capacity of the sentence dangerously close to its limit. If the sentence ended with a period after “early,” all would be well. But alas, already stuffed to the limit, it commits suicide by trying to gobble down “his coaches trying to get him to stay on as a graduate student.”
Can you see why breaking up a long, ungainly sentence into two (or more) is the solution of preference?
Summarizing: dparticipial phrase are like thickeners in cooking–the flour or cornstarch of fiction writing. You wouldn’t be able to make pancakes without flour. But dump in too much and your batter is a useless paste. All the fresh blueberries and maple syrup in the world can’t rescue you: your best efforts as a breakfast chef are doomed.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Grammar has always been a source of anxiety for me. I’ve bought and read various books on the subject, but my mind doesn’t seem to absorb the lessons. This blog, however, was excellent. I really love how you have broken this down into examples.
Thanks, Alegra. Personally, I don’t understand how to do anything until I see it done.
Good lesson here with sentences that show exactly why we mustn’t. That first sentence in the summary describes exactly what those participial phrases do.
What happens when the participial phrase is at the end of the sentence e.g “A wall of noise slammed into the old man, driving the breath from his lungs, hurling him across the yard. His back smashed into the concrete, pain flooding his body.” Or are these not participial phrases?
They are, Mike. And they work nicely as modifiers, placed where they are. The sentence’s subject and predicate come first, so the action has already occurred. The pressure is off. But imagine if they opened the sentence, making us wait…wait…wait for for the main event. Awkward.