Don't leave me dangling

Checking some proofs the other day, an error leaped out at me. Appearing on the acknowledgments page, I couldn’t help noticing this dangling modifier:

Like all other authors . . . , there are many others who helped me get this book together.

Leading a paragraph in which the author thanks his two proofreaders, I needn’t point out the irony of this error.

Can you see it? It’s a dangling modifier, and if the text of this post so far has set your teeth on edge but you can’t quite identify why, it may be because all three of my own sentences surrounding that quotation start with danglers. (To fix the quote, I’d recast the second part so that its subject is “I.”)

Here’s a dangler from a novel I set a few years ago (rendered from memory):

Resplendent in a Pendleton shirt, his legs were sheathed in blue jeans.

Do you see it? His legs are wearing the shirt. This is the kind of grammatical error that can be difficult to spot, because you can usually tell instantly what the sentence is supposed to say. I suspect danglers are also very common in speech, so we’re used to hearing and interpreting them on the fly. Danglage happens when you start a sentence thinking of one thing and then move on to a new idea before reaching that whole pesky subject/verb part.

I should explain here that I’m not supposed to see this kind of stuff. It’s not my job to read the text; that’s the responsibility of at least four other people (editor, copy editor, proofreader, and author). When I check proofs, I’m supposed to just be looking for layout goofs, places where the compositor has failed to follow the designer’s instructions, or where the designer has failed to properly instruct. This requires my looking closely at the front matter of each book (those ten or so miscellaneous pages that fluff up the front, before where the main text begins), reading all the display type (chapter titles, headings, running heads, anything other than straight text), and paging through the whole book to make sure that the pages in each spread are the same length (the compositor will sometimes have to run a spread one line long or short in order to make the text fit better).

In the moonlit hours, I occasionally work as a copy editor and proofreader, so I sometimes can’t help noticing editorial errors while I’m checking layout. If I see a few obvious ones, I may just mark them and be done with it; if I see many, or particularly stupid ones, or if I’m not sure that they’re errors (maybe the author really meant to misspell “Ebenezer Scrooge”; surely that’s much more likely than that the CE didn’t take 2.5 seconds to Google it), I take the proofs back to the production editor and ask him or her to straighten them out. If a copy editor or proofreader is chronically missing typos—particularly the kinds of typos a lazy, illiterate designer can spot while trying very hard not to read anything—the PE needs to know.

There are, unfortunately, a lot of freelancers with reasonable-looking credentials and references who can’t edit their way out of a paper bag, and not all publishers test prospective freelancers before hiring them. I once had a bright-sounding new guy copyedit two short books in close succession, only to discover while the second set of pages was hurtling back toward me via FedEx that the punk had completely failed on the first one. He’s the one who missed the aforementioned shirt-wearing legs, as well as dozens of other howlers. And this was at a company where the publisher believed in copyediting or proofreading, but not both; he thought it was a waste of money, particularly for fiction. So I proofed the book myself (I’m a sucker that way) and discovered that practically every time the scene changed, some poor body part was donning something inappropriate. Never mind the oddness of the author’s believing that readers would actually care what everyone was wearing at various points in the day; far more distressing was the fact that he clearly was convinced that a dangling modifier was some kind of cool literary device.

Said author was a sweetheart, and the schedule was a shambles already, so I reviewed the recorrected proofs with him, and he was grateful to have the many grammatical problems explained. It was his sixth book, but no one had ever pointed them out to him before. Did I explain them to the proofreader, as well? No, I just never hired him again. He’s probably wasted the time and money of many other publishers since then—but not on more than two books per client, I’d guess.

So, to review, even if you’re not a proofreader, make sure you can recognize these little darlings. Because having a shirt wrapped around your legs, the sidewalk is much more likely to come up and whack you in the face.

Nerd Bonus: While I agree that many of the things on this list of English non-errors (via Kottke, via BoingBoing) are, in fact, nonerrors [sic], citing Chaucer to justify saying a book is entitled instead of titled is ridiculous. Chaucer didn’t write in English, you nyce ers (dumbass); he wrote in Middle English. If the languages were the same, we wouldn’t need sites like Harvard’s page on Chaucer’s Pronunciation, Grammar and Vocabulary and all these interlinear translations.