Squinty Squinting Modifiers Sentence Structure#3

Squinty Squinting Modifiers

On my last 2 posts, I showed how messy my Grammar is by Grammarly’s standards. These are mistakes that the basic word program missed or it is not able to identify. There are days when I wish I had a magic book editing Genie to magically make the book perfect. Since wishes are a fantasy, I’ll have to do the work myself.

The example from my book is from the rough draft of Prophecy Ink. Before I did my readthrough to correct the worst and most obvious. I’m using these examples because they were there and it’s how we learn.

Contextual Spelling: 349
Grammer: 212
Punctuation: 999+ (Um that’s embarrassing)
Sentence Structure: 19
Style: 127
Vocabulary Enhancement: 267

Here are some common sentence structure problems found. If you missed a previous post you can click on the crossed out links here.
Incorrect word order .
Missing Verb .
Squinting Modifier
Incorrect Adverb Placement
Missing _____ in emphatic sentence

Something that came up a time or two was Squinting Modifier. What is that?

Squinting modifiers are also called Ambiguous modifiers(Fist example not from my book)

Eating too much ice cream quickly gives me a stomachache.

The modifier is ‘quickly’. Am I eating ice cream quickly or is it quickly giving me a headache? It’s not clear. The Modifier is misplaced. To fix this I need to reposition it to make it clear what is happening “quickly” 

When I eat too much ice cream I quickly develop a stomachache.
Eating too much ice cream quickly always gives me a stomachache.

It doesn’t matter how it’s fixed or rewritten as long as it is made clear if it’s a headache or the action of eating ice cream that happens quickly.

Now in my book, I had this one.

Okay, so to begin with that’s just a horrible sentence. Filter words abound and it drags on. here is the fix:

“Oh lovely, you’re awake dear.” The nurse’s kind tone broke my heart.

Squinting modifiers are often hard to catch as the writer. I missed this blaring one. I ended up rewriting the entire paragraph to make it flow better. This was just one of many errors in the paragraph.

My advice about Squinting Modifiers:

I hate squinting at squinting modifiers. Most of them were easily fixed by punctuation or a simple sentence rewrite. Take the time to have someone review your work or use a program that can identify them for you. FYI the basic word program I used did not catch any of them.

-Sheryl

Copyright © 2018 All rights reserved

Genie