高等英语考试中攻克句子改错题,最全的语法详解

half into a subordinate clause:

Since they reprimanded everyone at the graduation party, the police

didn’t seem very sympathetic to the fact that it was our senior year.

Alternatively, you could have inserted the word and between the two clauses:

The police reprimanded everyone at the party, and they didn’t seem

very sympathetic to the fact that it was our senior year.

The majority of Improving Sentence questions dealing with run-ons will requireyou to use one of the three methods we’ve discussed to fix the sentence.

3. Misplaced Modifiers

A modifying phrase is a phrase that explains or describes a word. In standard written English, modifiers usually appear right next to the word they explain ordescribe. When modifiers are placed far away from the word they describe, thesentence becomes confusing because it’s often unclear which word the

modifying phrase is referring to, as in the following sentence:

Eating six cheeseburgers, nausea overwhelmed Jane.

This sentence is problematic. We can logically infer that Jane was doing the eating, but because the modifying phrase (Eating six cheeseburgers) is so far from the word it’s intended to modify (Jane), figuring out the meaning of the sentence takes a lot of work. It could very well seem as if “nausea” rather than“Jane” is being described. Therefore, the meaning of the sentence could be that“nausea” ate six cheeseburger fries. The sentence as-is does not convey the meaning the writer intended.

When you see a modifier followed by a comma, make sure the word that the modifier describes comes right after the comma. A corrected version of this sentence could read:

After eating six cheeseburgers, Jane was overwhelmed with nausea.