Understanding misplaced modifiers (and how to avoid them)

What is a modifier?

Before we learn about misplaced modifiers, let’s remember what a modifier is: modifiers are words or phrases that provide additional information about other words in the sentence. People use them to make a sentence clearer and more precise. Most modifiers contain either adjectives or adverbs.

Here are some examples of what modifiers look like in a sentence:

• I ate the donut in the kitchen.
• Her green earrings were very appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day.
• Jacob was thirty minutes late to our very important meeting.
• Their team received the second-place prize, much to their dismay.
• The tortoiseshell cat viciously attacked the expensive leather chair until it was covered in deep scratch marks.

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In these examples, each sentence still makes sense without the bolded modifiers. However, the modifiers add necessary details to the situation to paint a bigger picture of each scenario. Saying “Jacob was late to our meeting” is a complete sentence but adding the modifiers “thirty minutes” and “very important” to the sentence lets us know how late he was and why his lateness was such a bad thing.

What is a misplaced modifier?

As the name suggests, a misplaced modifier is a modifier that is in the wrong place. By misplacing a modifier, you can unintentionally use it to describe a different part of a sentence and make its meaning unclear.

Let’s take a look at a sentence with a misplaced modifier:

• While searching for sea glass on the beach, Reina found a blue baby’s pacifier.

Since it’s not likely for the baby itself to be blue, we can conclude that the pacifier is blue. However, the way that the sentence is written makes it seem like the modifier “blue” is describing the baby. It would be better to place “blue” before “baby” to make it “a baby’s blue pacifier” instead.

Here is a more complicated example of a misplaced modifier:

• Leo unwrapped the sandwich that was brought in by the staff hastily.

This sentence is a little bit more confusing because it is unclear what the word “hastily” is modifying. Did Leo hastily unwrap the sandwich, or did the staff hastily bring the sandwich to Leo? We can restructure the sentence in two different ways to clarify what is happening:

• Leo hastily unwrapped the sandwich that was brought in by the staff.
• Leo unwrapped the sandwich that was hastily brought in by the staff.

What’s the difference between misplaced modifiers vs. dangling modifiers?

Dangling modifiers are similar to misplaced modifiers, but they’re two different types of errors in writing. The key difference between the two is that a dangling modifier leaves out a word that is important to the context of the sentence.

Here are two examples of similar sentences, one with a misplaced modifier and the other with a dangling modifier:

• Misplaced modifier: Having made that mistake before, it was not done again by Jerry.
• Dangling modifier: Having made that same mistake before, it was not done again.

In the example with the misplaced modifier, the intended word that’s being modified isn’t in the correct place. The sentence with the dangling modifier is incorrect because it misses the word that it modifies. If we were to write the sentence without errors, it would look like this:

• Having made that mistake before, Jerry did not do it again.

Writing mistakes can happen to anyone. But you can always improve your work in no time by exploring helpful writing tips and using a grammar checker.