I’ve written before about danglers, modifiers—usually phrases—that are misplaced in a sentence and instead of clearly modifying what they are meant to, create confusion in the reader’s mind and may even lead to chuckles.

A phrase that set me off recently was one from a photo exhibit at National Geographic, featuring the work of four legendary photographers. The offending sentence, about photographer Kurt Wentzel, reads:

                                “After serving with the Allies in WWII, Wentzel’s boss
                                gave him one of his first assignments with the now
                                famous instructions: ‘Do India.’ ”

The person who had just served in WWII was Wentzel, but by the structure of the sentence that modifying phrase is linked to the boss, the only nearby noun to which a modifier can rightly attach. I was distracted almost too much to appreciate the simple instructions from a bygone era.

Since spotting this dangler in National Geographic’s own copy, I’ve had my eyes drawn to examples in other publications. Here are some.

•    From the Washington Post, appearing both August 30 and 31 on a map:                                                   
                                “Unprotected during Katrina, floodgates have been built to
                                prevent the lake from surging into the city.”

Looking at the sentence by itself, I didn’t know what was unprotected during Katrina. It couldn’t be the floodgates, which had not even been built. With the help of the map, I concluded the phrase applied to three areas designated on the map. I know space is tight in map notes, but still, is that an excuse for obfuscation?

•    Again from the Washington Post and pointed out by another reader in the August 30 “Free For All” column referring to an August 24 description of Joseph Biden:

                                “. . . a 65-year-old with white hair jogging to the lectern.”

At least this example has humor and can almost be forgiven because the writer does know the difference between a podium and a lectern and uses the correct term.

•    Finally, an example in an email from a colleague and attributed to Groucho Marx:

                                “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got
                                in my pajamas I don't know.”

This definitely left me chuckling, perhaps because I can hear in my mind Marx saying it. It was given as an example of a paraprosdokian (from the Greek words for "beyond" and "expectation"), a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader to reframe the first part. To me it’s not a paraprosdokian so much as a perfect example of a misplaced modifier. Other examples of paraprosdokians that do not have danglers:

                                Where there's a will, I want to be in it.

                                I'm trying. . . very trying.

So watch those modifying phrases and make sure they’re attached to the right noun, but be creative and, just for the fun of it, think up sentences that are “beyond expectation.”

Do you remember learning about topic sentences and the construction of paragraphs when you were in school? My memory is faint, so when the subject of topic sentences popped into my mind (more later about why that happened), I turned to Writers Inc, A Student Handbook for Writing and Learning, the textbook my son used several years ago while attending public high school in Maryland.

Sure enough, fairly early in the book, was a section titled “The Parts of a Paragraph,” and the first subject addressed was the topic sentence. Following this were descriptions of the body and the closing of a paragraph, and then examples of expository, descriptive, narrative, and persuasive paragraphs. Each sample paragraph comprised about 150 words.

Now, to why I’m thinking so much about paragraph construction. This morning I revised the “Credits and History” section of the National Geographic Style Manual, which I had last modified a year ago and originally wrote several years earlier. As I updated information, I was hit by how long the paragraphs were. In my more recent writing—for emails, for this blog, for an internal grammar column for the NG staff—I have adopted, without thinking much about it, what seems to be de rigueur on the Web: punchy, short paragraphs separated by lots of space.

So in revising the manual text, I broke up several of the longer paragraphs and added space between them (with help from my techie friend Tom).

I created single-sentence paragraphs—though one, I admit, is fairly long at 49 words.

And even thought about non-sentence paragraphs.

Voilà! I can join the electronic age. No need to worry about effective topic sentences; just make each paragraph a topic sentence by itself.

But this I cannot do. I can't abandon the paragraph. I was taught too well in school how to logically develop paragraphs, how to construct complex sentences within those paragraphs, how to effectively string words and thoughts together for a purpose in a neat block of words.

So, although my paragraphs may be shorter than they once were, I will restrict the number of single-sentence ones I write. And I will hope that schools continue to teach paragraph construction and that writing 150-word paragraphs does not become a lost art.