Unfortunately, parti-ciples have nothing to do with parties!
One of the most popular stylistic elements in prose is the participle. Its creation through appending a subtle “-ing” to a verb is so quickly done and changes the tone of the whole sentence, making it flow and hum with skillful art. Or does it?
It’s not easy to explain participles, as they are literary chimeras. They’re not really verbs anymore, nor are they nouns (unlike their relatives, the gerunds). They aren’t adjectives either, but they form adjectives when they work together with the rest of the clause they reside in.
Let’s make up an example and take this sentence:
I bit my lip, and I looked shyly over at her.
We could turn either of the two verbs “bit” and “looked” into a participle. Let’s go for the first one:
Biting my lip, I looked shyly over at her.
With the participle we created a sense of simultaneity. The simple sentence “I bit my lip” is turned into an adjective that modifies the subject “I” in the subsequent clause.
Another example would be:
Floating in the warm water, we lost all sense of time.
Okay, that was easy. But before you jump and exclaim, “Yay, let’s do this everywhere!” please take the time to read on. Everything that’s nice comes with a catch. In this case, at least two of them.
Dangling thingies, beware!
The first one is the age-old monster called the “Dangling Participle”.
But how can a participle dangle? The answer is, this is a slightly misleading expression. I wrote a little earlier that a participle modifies a noun. So, if you use one, you have take great care that the participle finds the correct noun.
Let’s change the first example slightly:
I bit my lip, and the girl across the table looked shyly at me.
If we do the same as above, we’ll end up with a shy but rather violent girl:
Biting my lip, the girl across the table looked shyly at me.
The noun in sight of the participle is “the girl”, so we’re telling the world that this shy girl bit our lip. How she did that from across the table is left to anyone’s imagination… No, not really. This is a case of a dangling participle.
Another one would be (with a little more context around it):
The lush canopy shielded the path and protected me from the blazing sun. Walking through the forest, birds and deer filled it with their sounds.
No, the birds and deer weren’t walking through the forest. I was! But the sentence above would suggest differently.
Greedy little buggers!
If you know me well, you’re aware that I have a little bit of a comma fetish. My belief is that commas are the most under-appreciated tool in a writer’s repertoire, and participles are one case where they become important. Compare the next two sentences, and you’ll probably see the difference instantly:
I looked up the tree waving at my friend.
I looked up the tree, waving at my friend.
As the title of this part says, participles are greedy little buggers. They try to latch onto the closest noun they can find. In the first example, this is the tree. But why would a tree wave at our friend?
In such constructs, where there is another noun between the one to be modified and the participle, a comma tells it to be less greedy and go for the more distant noun. So, in the example, the comma says, “Hey, it’s not the tree that waves, it’s me!”
This is a case of a semi-dangling participle, but harder to spot and often overlooked, so don’t mind if you don’t get this right every time.
It also makes a difference if the participle is at the beginning or end of the sentence. If it’s at the beginning, no comma can save you from its greed - if you put a participle at the front of the queue, it’ll always devour the first edible thing in reach from the buffet.
Standing here, completely verbless.
I wrote at the beginning that participles are no longer verbs. Thus, a sentence where an -ing form has been attached to every verb is no longer grammatically correct. We’re often tempted to form sentences like, “His eyes staring hard at me,” or “His breath forming tiny clouds in the air.”
Even though nothing “dangles” here and every participle has its noun nearby, these are not correct sentences. They have no verb. “staring” is no longer one and “forming” isn’t either.
We could resolve this in two different way:
His eyes are staring hard at me.
His eyes stare hard at me.
If I may offer some purely subjective advice at this point: if you encounter this kind of verbless sentence in your writing and want to fix it, the second solution is nearly always the best one. The basic verb may be shorter and not sound as smooth, but you’re telling a story, not reciting a poem. Save the continuous form (that’s what we get by adding a form of “to be” before the -ing form) for when it matters that two events are happening at the same time.
Story Verifier
