Some professional writers get so good at their craft that they become complacent with their English grammar and usage. Having navigated the grammar terrain so well and for so long, they begin to overrely on their writerly instinct instead of becoming coldly critical of their written work. Soon they become blind to the individual trees in the forest of their prose, so to speak. As a result, they sometimes come up with monumental grammar bloopers that, when missed out by less-than-eagle-eyed editors before publication, would mark them as far from the English-savvy writers they thought they were.
In the essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, retitled here as “Dissecting two grammar curiosities and crudities,” I zero in on two such monumental grammar bloopers, then give a prescription for preventing them from ruining our written English and our hard-earned reputation as professional writers. (June 26, 2011)
Dissecting two grammar curiosities and crudities
To heighten our English-grammar awareness, let’s dissect two grammar curiosities and crudities that I came across in my newspaper readings:
From a foreign news service story: “News photos showed the derailed train laying at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a carriage that had fallen onto its side.”
From a newspaper columnist’s essay: “As a young short story fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago, the workshop banner carried our batch’s official theme: Who do you write for?”
Found what’s wrong with the grammar of the sentences above?
The more grammar-savvy among you must have easily figured out what’s wrong with the first sentence. It misuses the progressive form of the transitive verb “lay,” which means “to put or set something down.” The correct verb to use here is the progressive form of the intransitive “lie,” which means “to stay at rest horizontally,” as shown in the corrected sentence below:
“News photos showed the derailed train lying at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a carriage that had fallen onto its side.”
But before moving on to the next sentence, let’s ponder this very interesting question: Why are people so prone to mixing up “lay” and “lie”?
Well, to begin with, they are look-alikes, sound-alikes, and mean-alikes. Even worse, they sometimes inflect into a bewildering form in certain tenses; oddly, for instance, the past-tense form of the intransitive “lie” takes exactly the same form as that of the present-tense plural of the transitive “lay”—“lay” in both cases. It’s really no wonder why even seasoned writers and editors often bungle their use.
If you think I’m overstating the case about how notoriously misused this verb-pair is, look at this recent reportage by a foreign news service on the earthquake devastation in China: “An hour after the quake, a half-dozen patients in blue-striped pajamas stood outside the hospital. One was laying on a hospital bed in the parking lot” (italicization mine). The correct verb form here is, of course, “lying,” the progressive form of the intransitive verb “lie.”
In the case of the second problematic sentence, here’s the big problem: Its message has been inadvertently mangled by a terribly misplaced modifier. Because of improper positioning, the prepositional phrase “as a young short story fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago” absurdly modifies the wrong subject, “the workshop banner.” Its proper and logical subject is, of course, the “young short-story fellow” or the author herself.
This is a very serious grammatical problem and I’m quite sure that you didn’t find it so easy to fix. Indeed, it took me quite an effort to break that bad interlock between the modifying phrase and its wrong subject. Finally, however, I came up with these three major overhauls that nicely gets rid of that misplaced modifying phrase:
(1) “I recall that when I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow a decade ago, the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’”
(2) “A decade ago, when I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow, the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’”
(3) “A decade ago, I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow and I recall that the workshop banner carried this official theme for our batch: “Who do you write for?”
Our best defense against misplaced modifiers is nothing less than eternal vigilance over our language, not just over form or grammar. We must always check for logic. If what we’re saying looks grammatically correct but somehow doesn’t make sense, it’s a telltale sign of a misplaced modifier somewhere. We need to hunt it down to prevent it from doing mischief on our prose. (May 24, 2008)
-----------From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 24, 2008 © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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