Wolfie, I hear you're having a weird dreams bout Mrs____. May I start off by saying, what an odd name! I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but I can give some insight on the use of a dangling participle! Before we talk about what it means to dangle a participle, we have to answer the question, "What is a participle?" It’s a tough question because participles have a few different jobs. Today, we’re only going to talk about their job that makes them look like adjectives. They tell you more about the noun that follows. For example, "dream" is a verb, and "dreaming" is its present participle. "Speed" is a verb, and "speeding" is its present participle. To use the verb, you could say, "He will speed on the freeway." "Speed" is an action, a verb. To use "speeding" as an adjective-like participle, you could say "Follow that speeding car." "Speeding" acts something like an adjective modifying the noun "car." It tells you what the car is doing—what kind of car it is—a speeding car. A dangling participle is simply a participle intended to modify a noun that is not actually present in the text. A dangling participle also modifies an unintended subject. When you dangle a participle, it means your participial phrase is hanging there in your sentence with no proper subject in sight. They hate that as much as you hate it when you get stripped in KaW. Here’s an example: Hiking the trail, the birds chirped loudly. The birds are the only subject in the sentence, and they directly follow the participial phrase. The participial phrase has to grab on to something, so it grabs the only subject—the birds. So what that sentence says is that the birds were hiking the trail, and that's probably not what I mean. There was probably somebody hiking the trail and hearing the birds chirping loudly. We can fix it by adding the proper subject right after the participial phrase: Hiking the trail, Wolfie and Cobra heard birds chirping loudly. So, to easily summarize this, a dangling participle modifies the wrong noun. I hope this helps with your 5th grade thong wearing ogre looking teacher nightmares! - Cobra the English Teacher
It does indeed Mr. Cobra sir...I was under a totally different impression as to what a participle was and why dangling would not be a normal state. No more nightmares for me!
Reading this only shows me that I cannot meta-english yet, or I need a dictionary and a grammar book with me to make it, . In other words, I understood nothing. Halp! .