I’d like you to take a look at the following paragraph:
As Wordy Bird perched there, watching the sun rise beyond the nest, her belly rumbled, thinking of the worm she’d catch for breakfast. Her wings flapped faster, just knowing how good it would taste. When she landed, her head tilted, listening for that telltale rustle of worm flesh beneath the earth.
What is wrong with these sentences—grammatically? (Don’t worry, I’m not going to weigh you down with too much grammar-junkie jargon today.)
Let’s look at the first:
As Wordy sat watching the sun rise beyond the nest, her belly rumbled, thinking of the worm she’d catch for breakfast.
This is a sentence of a kind that I see in writers’ manuscripts on an almost daily basis, so that means a lot of writers are making this error. Let’s break it into parts:
As Wordy sat watching the sun rise beyond the nest,
her belly rumbled,
thinking of the worm she’d catch for breakfast.
The first two work together, right?
As Wordy sat watching the sun rise beyond the nest, her belly rumbled…
What about this part:
…her belly rumbled, thinking of the worm she’d catch for breakfast.
Do you see the problem yet?
If you don’t see it yet, ask yourself this: who or what is thinking of the worm? In this sentence construction, it’s her belly. And apart from giving us a gnarly case of butterflies when we’re about to do something scary, bellies are not known for their capacity for intelligent thought.
Now, if you go back to the second and third sentences, perhaps you'll see why I have a problem with those, too.
Some of you, including those of you who have worked with me before or taken one of my classes, may pick up on at least one other (potential) problem when the three sentences are put together. Can work out what it* is?
* Hint: try reading them aloud.
The moral of story is: Don't dangle your modifiers. (*And watch out for repetitive sentence structure!)