Now that I have your attention, I’d like to talk about dangling participles. This most famous of danglers is must-know stuff for any self-respecting smarty-pants. Not because the concept will help ...

Okay, now we're going to tackle the dangling participle. A participle is the form of the verb that has ing on the end of it. And when you begin a sentence with a participle, that phrase has to modify ...

I’m a little fussy about past participles. Unjustifiably fussy. It may have to do with the fact that I married someone from small-town Massachusetts, where everything is “I have ate this” and “I ...

READING THIS sentence, it may occur to you that something is slightly awry with it. Or you may not notice anything wrong at all. The first three words are a “dangling modifier”. This writing fault has ...

Last week we talked about how to look up past participles in your dictionary. Here's a condensed lesson: For any irregular verb, the past tense and past participle are listed right after the entry ...

Continues from Part One and shows where participles and participial phrases can go wrong. MOST dictionaries show the three principal parts of a verb; for example, see (base form), saw (past tense), ...