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Friday, August 26, 2011

Criminal Sentence 591: Can Facts Play?

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I'm anti-misplaced modifier. I could point out at least one a day if I wanted, but that would be boring. I do want to point this one out, though; it comes from Tennis magazine, which you'd think would be more with it:

"After years of playing and coaching tennis, two facts emerge."

Fact 1: This sentence is incorrect.
Fact 2: This sentence is annoying!

Who wants to rewrite it for me and make me feel better?

3 comments:

k-bro said...

I'll go with:

"After years of playing and coaching tennis, I (or he, she, they, George, Betty...whoever) realized two facts to be true:..."

Warsaw Will said...

None of the normal dangler fixes work for me because they change the meaning of the original - 'emerge' is especially difficult to get round. So personally I'd go for a bit of fronting.

From my years of playing and coaching tennis, two facts emerge.

Failing that I'd stick with the original, which for me is neither grammatically incorrect (I don't think even Fowler suggested that), nor annoying.

The Sentence Sleuth said...

I like K-Bro's idea.