What’s wrong with this sentence?

Hmmm … courtyards can’t look out of windows.

We often use introductory phrases in government writing. They add variety to sentences. But as this example shows, it’s important to pay close attention to meaning.

Please explain

The introductory phrase ‘Looking out of the window’ and the main clause ‘the Senate courtyard …’ aren’t connected properly. The sentence doesn’t follow a general rule of sentence structure:

If you use an introductory phrase, immediately follow it with the noun (or noun phrase) it describes. If you don’t do this, the meaning might be ambiguous.

We can fix the sentence by adding the noun ‘I’ and the verb ‘saw’ to the main clause:

When an introductory clause isn’t connected properly to the main clause, it’s called a ‘dangling modifier’. Let’s use the short term ‘dangler’ to help my word count.

Implied subjects in danglers

There are 2 subjects in this sentence – one in the introductory phrase and one in the main clause.

To find the subject of ‘Entering my office’, we write the phrase according to its meaning: ‘As I entered my office’. Now we know that the subject of the phrase is ‘I’. Because ‘I’ doesn’t appear in the phrase, we say it’s ‘implied’.

The subject of the main clause is easy to identify: the noun phrase ‘the fire alarms’.

If we highlight both subjects, it’s easy to see they’re different: 

Our example demonstrates the grammatical definition of a dangler:

A ‘dangling modifier’ is an introductory phrase that has an implied subject that is different from the subject of the sentence’s main clause.

Dangling well 

Not all dangling modifiers dangle badly. Some sentences with dangling modifiers are easy to understand. Readers can likely guess the correct meaning from the surrounding text.

This is true for particular danglers. Here's 2 of them:

• dangling modifiers with the writer (I), the reader (you, we) or the generic person (someone, one, anyone) as implied subjects
• main clauses that have the subject ‘it’ or ‘there’.

Back in the Senate courtyard with fire alarms

Did you spot it? The first bullet point in the list above applies to our first 2 examples. Readers will probably guess the correct meaning because both danglers have the implied subject ‘I’. But there’s always a risk they won’t.

Implied subjects are not obvious to everyone. And your readers might be grammarians who are distracted by danglers.
Rewrite for clarity if you have any doubts. It can be as simple as adding the implied subject to the main clause.

References

Biber D, Conrad S and Leech G (2002) Longman student grammar of spoken and written English, Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, UK.

Butcher J, Drake C, Leach M (2006) Butcher’s copy-editing: the Cambridge handbook for editors, copy-editors and proofreaders, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Butterfield J (ed) (2015) Fowler’s dictionary of modern English usage, 4th edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Dreyer B (2020) Dreyer’s English: an utterly correct guide to clarity and style, Arrow Books, London.

Garner BA (2022) Garner’s modern English usage, 5th edn, Oxford University Press, New York.

Kaufman L and Straus J (2021) The blue book of grammar and punctuation, 12th edn, Jossey-Bass, Hoboken, New Jersey.

Murphy EM (2019) Working words, Lacuna Publishing, Armidale.