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Perhaps the most famous misplaced modifier is a joke (see disclaimer below!) told by Groucho Marx:   “This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”   Disclaimer: Quite aside from the misplaced modifier, I have to say that – to modern ears – this joke actually seems in bad taste considering the horrors of elephant poaching, trophy hunting, etc. As an animal lover, I’ve therefore devised a more sensitive version:     The wildlife safari I recently took in Kenya was amazing. Early one morning I filmed an elephant in my pajamas.   Less offensive but still offering amusement due to the placing of the modifier. To fix this sentence we could say:   The wildlife safari I recently took i ...

First, I should apologize for late posting; I was either in the air or in one of four airports on Friday this week so regular orders had to take precedence over updating the blog in the limited time available. As a direct result of this travelling, however, I was also inspired to interrupt my four-part grammar series, Why Grammar is Necessary for Clarity, postponing the fourth and last part till next Friday.   Why the interruption? Frustration with the lack of clarity that I encountered, in one airport in particular – I won’t name it but suffice to say that fabled Southern charm was sadly missing here – led me to consider the importance to businesses of all kinds of clarity. It’s not just to do with grammar, although that is often an essential factor, it’ ...

Part 3 in our Why Grammar is Necessary for Clarity series deals with pronouns. Injudicious use of pronouns can cause confusion, to say the least, in your writing.   Consider a recent news headline:   Boy saves pet dog from bear attack by stabbing it with a kitchen knife   While we might guess at what happened here, it could be that the boy stabbed his dog with the kitchen knife – mercy killing? Unlikely, perhaps, but it’s still not 100% clear who the pronoun ‘it’ refers to in this context.   Similarly:   Pam was meeting her friend Sara for a shopping afternoon. When they met she suggested they go for a coffee first as she wanted her to try out a new cafe that she had discovered the previous week.   Confused? I would be!   It’ ...