“Laying on the grass in my backyard, it was a perfect night
to relax and watch the shooting stars.”
Oof! the agent feels that right in her gut–and tosses the manuscript.
Why? Forget the dangling modifier sin for now–the fact that modifier “laying on the grass” has nothing to modify– what’s really making the agent crazy is her profound conviction that anyone who ever breathed a word of English should know we don’t LAY in the grass. We lie.
Could this be your query…could it be you?
If so, don’t despair: the eternally bountiful Internet, as always, is there to redeem us. Confusing Words is a ready resource for the grammatically or syntactically confused, an instant online guide for sorting out these matters, thus earning you bonus points and a smoother ride.
I know, I know, we hear “lay down” in conversation all day long, so what’s the big deal? It’s this: Once we are writing, a higher standard automatically goes into effect. A subtle change in the status of our words occurs when they’re written down. They are now on record. Suddenly sticking to the rules matters a lot more, especially to the pros, those who make their living on the written word.
Before going on, here’s an important disclaimer: dialogue is not subject to the lay-lie rule, or any other principle of grammar or usage. Not necessarily. If a given character would say “I’m going to go lay down now,” because he/she never knew any other way to say it, then you must write it just like that. To pretty it up would undercut your characterization. But the “necessarily” is an important qualifier: if you’re portraying a meticulously correct English professor, he will never be believed if you allow “lay down” to come out of his mouth.
That said, back to the big deal: Agents are extremely busy. They face piles of new manuscripts daily, and to get through them, they must go at the job full speed with their clocks ticking. Obviously, separating wheat from chaff as quickly as possible is one key to staying on top of the flow, so they’re finely attuned to catch lay-lie abusers and weed them out of the pile. “Lay down” will brand the offender immediately as untrained. Worse, every succeeding page will be stained in their eyes–If they read on at all, which is doubtful.
Let’s try it out on a commonly misused pairing: affect and effect. Suppose I wrote the following:
“Misusing lay for lie effected the agent’s entire reading
of my submission.”
Yikes, did you hear the giant buzzer going off? Another marker. Confusing Words summarizes the problem this way:
“Most often affect is used as a verb and effect is used as a noun. Something that affects you will have an effect on you.”
Neat, clean. So then, the corrected sentence should read:
“The negative effect of a few errors on the agent’s perception of me
was so dire it affected the outcome of my entire submission.”
But hopefully, Confusing Words will help us keep agent relations from going instantly sour.
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