Placement of modifiers (12)

Careless placement of modifiers is a frequent cause of unclear (and annoying) writing. Don’t make your readers rely on interpretation or guesswork.

Example of the careless placement of a modifier

An article about the 2009-2010 Toyota recalls contains this paragraph:

“Now, the agents of the government, which controls GM, are publicly castigating Toyota in an attempt to smear the company and increase their own profitability. As a direct competitor with Toyota by way of involvement with GM, the assault against Toyota represents one of the most public conflicts of interests the business world has experienced.” (Boldface added.)

Critique of the example

The reader may correctly guess that “As a direct competitor with Toyota by way of involvement with GM” is a prepositional phrase acting as an adverb and modifying the verb represents. The reader also may correctly guess that the preposition as at the beginning of the prepositional phrase probably means “in the role of” and therefore must refer to a person or group of persons, specifically the person or group of persons that represents. But this person or group of persons is not present in the sentence; the subject of the verb represents is the word assault.

If the reader is persistent, he may look back and guess that the preposition as probably refers to government, which is a group of persons and could logically and grammatically be the subject of the verb represents.

The second sentence should have been something like this:

Because the government is a direct competitor with Toyota by way of involvement with GM, its assault on Toyota is a conflict of interest.

The Takeaway: Place every modifier carefully. When a modifier is a phrase, construct the phrase carefully. Making your readers work harder to read a sentence than you worked to write it is indolent and rude. Your readers may resent you for it.

See disclaimer.