Recently, the Los Angeles Times described the movie "Dheepan" as being about Sri Lankan refugees trying to escape ''their violent past in France." That made reader Rod do a double-take. ''There's a ...

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 ...

That's what Mussolini's fascist bully boys poured down the throats of their political enemies, force-feeding them so much laxative that the treatment amounted to torture and, sometimes, death. I do ...

My friend Peter Page builds high-rises. He knows that if he were to put a beam in the wrong place, the whole thing could come down. In a much less dramatic, costly and dangerous way, a misplaced word ...

This most famous of danglers is must-know stuff for any self-respecting smartypants. Not because the concept will help your writing all that much. Many people write just fine without the first clue ...