A Perfect Example

A few days (weeks?) ago I put up a post about dangling participles. Here's what Strunk and White have to say about participial phrases.
"A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject" (13).
The same holds true for a participial phrase at the end of a sentence. In other words, writers have to make sure they are actually saying what they think they are saying.
Writers breaking this rule run the risk of making themselves look ridiculous. Even the Associated Press sometimes has trouble.

Teacher OK after crashing into bear on a bicycle from Associated Press

Is the circus in town? Doesn't the headline make you wonder exactly where the bear got a bicycle in the first place?
A sentence in the body of the article is just as confusing.
The bear rolled over Litz's head, cracking his helmet, and scratched his back before scampering up a hill above the road.
So, the bear was wearing a helmet? (Always a good idea when biking, btw.) The bear's helmet scratched the biker? The bear stopped and gave himself some itch relief before scampering away? What? Aaaagh!
A great writing exercise would be to take the headline and that awfully confusing sentence and rewrite both.
For the headline: Bicylist Recovering After Crashing Into Bear.

Wouldn't that work better?

I suggest it would be best to break up the sentence: Litz's helmet cracked when the bear rolled over him. The bear also scratched Litz's back before scampering away up a hillside.

Whoops! I did it too! Litz's back didn't scamper up the hillside. See, the participial phrase describing the bear is too far away from the word bear. The "scampering up the hillside" is supposed to describe the bear, but because the noun "back" appears in the sentence after after the subject, the phrase now refers to "back" instead of "bear." Make sense?

Let's try again:
Litz's helmet cracked when the bear rolled over him. The bear also scratched Litz's back. Apparently unharmed, the bear scampered up a hillside.

Doesn't that better convey what most likely happened?

Writers have to analyze every sentence for goofs like this or we just end up looking silly and readers end up confused.

Romance Covers Redone

You know it is so easy to make fun of cheesy romance novels, that I probably should not do it. I found this site, though, that just cracked me up.
Here's an example of Longmire's "re-imagined" romance novel covers:



And one more:



If you'd like to check out more, visit

Longmire Does Romance Novels

It's hard to know which is more ridiculous, the romance novel cover art or the stories. At least Longmire made the covers more interesting.