Proposal Land

A dangling participle walks into a bar.
Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender,
the evening passes pleasantly.

If your eye tends to slide over words when you read, filling in meaning as you go, you might not even see dangling participles.  Explaining what’s wrong with this construction snarls us up in grammar jargon like “subject” and “modify,” usually generating glazed eyes in the explainee. Maybe a visual will work better.

Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender,
the evening passes pleasantly.

In English sentence structure, the orange bit is talking about the green bit. It doesn’t matter that you don’t mean it that way: That’s the way it works.

It *does* matter that it doesn’t make sense.

The good news is that it’s easy to fix. You can introduce a new subject — sorry, green bit — that does make sense with the orange bit.

Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender,
Sam finds that the evening passes pleasantly.

Or you can change the structure of the sentence.

Sam enjoys a cocktail and chats with the bartender:
The evening passes pleasantly.

Does it matter? Yes, because gramatically correct writing is part of a professional presentation. I don’t want to overstate its importance: Correct grammar is a hygiene factor, not a motivating one. You won’t earn marks for getting it right, but you could lose marks for getting it wrong.

 

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Check out this National Post article, 2020 Oct 20 for a similar example of a misplaced modifier:

As a relatively new virus, Jenne said there’s still a lot of unknowns about how easily COVID-19 spreads.

A run-on sentence walks into
a bar it starts flirting.
With a cute little sentence fragment.

If you don’t see what’s wrong with the first line of this joke, you’re in good company.

Run-ons are a common type of error. Among college students in the United States, run-on sentences are the eighteenth most frequent error made by native English speaker . . .
– grammarlyblog

(That’s from a post titled, “How do you correct run-on sentences it’s not as easy as it seems.” Hahaha.)

Run-on sentence:
Two complete ideas stuck together
without adequate punctuation.

That’s It. Don’t do It.

Do this instead:

A run-on sentence walks into
a bar, and it starts flirting.

Or this:

A run-on sentence walks into
a bar. It starts flirting.

Feeling daring? Try this:

A run-on sentence walks into
a bar: It starts flirting.

How does this happen in Proposal Land? The running-on, not the flirting. Quite often the culprit is writers jamming together existing text from more than one source, or cutting out extraneous text, and not carefully reading the result. That’s it.

As for the sentence fragment (as above & below), it’s just a sentence missing a subject or a verb or (gadzooks) both. They can be effective in small doses, but in large quantities they’re annoying. Choppy.

Often the easy fix for fragments is to attach them to the previous sentence:

They can be effective in small doses,
but in large quantities they’re annoying and choppy.

If that’s awkward to do, then add words to make a complete sentence:

How does this happen in Proposal Land?
By “this” I mean the running-on, not the flirting.

Run-on sentences have been used to interesting effect in literature but have no place in technical writing. Nope, not even one.

Sentence fragments have been used to excellent effect in blogs (ahem) but have little place in technical writing. You can consider using them if you’re writing a summary or introduction that wants some punch.

Just remember: Clarity trumps style.