Grammar or just plain common sense?
As I was saying a couple of blogs ago, although grammar can explain some of your unplain English habits you don’t need to be a grammar expert to put things right (Common objections to Plain English #1). This headline in Friday’s Guardian (20/1/2023) gives me a cute way of demonstrating this:
‘Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in antarctica using satellite images’
This was the start of a heartening article about a newly discovered colony of Emperor penguins in antarctica. But depending on how you read the headline you might now be thinking, Wow, isn’t technology clever! Wow, aren’t those penguins clever! Or perhaps even, What for? 😅
That’s because the ambiguous way the headline has been written makes all these reactions feasible.
___________________________________
For those of you who are interested in the grammar behind it, this is an example of a misplaced modifier—so-called because the additional bit of descriptive information or ‘modifier’ (in this case, using satellite images) has been ‘misplaced’, i.e. is too far away from, the thing it’s supposed to be modifying (scientists).
‘Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in antarctica using satellite images’
But if you’re not interested in the grammar, all you need to remember is this piece of common sense: when we read, we naturally assume that words that are physically close to each other in a sentence are also linked together in meaning. So all you need to do as a writer, is keep the bits that relate to each other close together in your sentences:
‘Scientists using satellite images discover emperor penguin colony in antarctica’
___________________________________
Some of you may be wondering why this matters, given that it doesn’t take too much effort to work out what the journalist really meant. And perhaps for this example it’s a fair challenge.
But what if the sentence in question was one of these?:
If your child has a seizure, administer a dose of Lamictal immediately, specifically a large one.
The police are looking for a man whom they suspect of attacking a young person from this neighbourhood.
______________
(If you fancy reading the article on Emperor penguins in full, click here.)
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.
