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DEMONSTRATION ONLY: This demonstration presents an abbreviated version of the complete MTEL course. Click 'Next' at the bottom of the screen or make a selection from the links on the left to begin. Not all links are available for the demo.
0008 Recognize Common Errors of Sentence Construction, Grammar, and Usage
Identify Misplaced or Dangling Modifiers
Modifiers should generally appear immediately before or after the word they modify. Most students have trouble with this rule only when they use phrases.
For example:
“While running down the street, the car hit and killed him.”
This sentence contains a dangling modifier because the sentence seems to be talking about a car actually running down the street when the accident occurred.
A better sentence would be,
“The car hit and killed him while he was running down the street.”
Parallel structure rules require that any list be parallel, or alike, in structure.
“Mary is talented, bright and thinks she will be a lawyer” is not parallel.
If you break the list down into its parts:
- talented,
- bright and
- thinks she will be a lawyer,
you can see that talented and bright are single adjectives whereas, thinks she will be a lawyer contains a verb. It could be rewritten:
“Mary thinks she will be a lawyer because she is talented and bright” or “Talented and bright, Mary thinks she will be a lawyer.”
Negatives should be used only once in each sentence. “I can’t get no satisfaction” may have been a popular song lyric, but it is not standard edited English. “I can’t get any satisfaction” or “I can get no satisfaction” would be required by most college English teachers.
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