Technical Writing ToolBox

A Blog on Technical Writing

Tag Archives: Sentence (linguistics)

Getting Rid of Misplaced Modifiers

7 Comments Posted by Gurpreet Singh on April 29, 2012

Modifiers are words, phrases, or clauses that restricts or provide additional information about other words, phrases, or clauses. Modifiers can be adjectives or adverbs. Modifiers that appear before the head are called premodifiers and modifiers that appear after the head are called postmodifiers.

We have a certain amount of freedom in deciding where to place our modifiers in a sentence:

We rowed the boat vigorously.
We vigorously rowed the boat.
Vigorously we rowed the boat.

The Art of Concise Writing

23 Comments Posted by Gurpreet Singh on April 13, 2012

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” – William Strunk in his classic text The Elements of Style.