Get Grammatical!
Learn About Modifiers for the SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE...and Life
The Princeton Review
When you modify something, you change it.
Or, grammatically speaking, you describe something.
A hallmark of modifiers is that they are nice to have, but not absolutely essential, for
a sentence to be grammatical.
Modifiers are tested across the board on standardized tests—think SAT, ACT, and beyond—and they’re
also super important for communicating clearly.
Oh, and here’s another fun fact: They’re also REALLY easy to get wrong.
Here’s a brief explainer:
For starters, you’ve got your adjectives and adverbs.
These are the most straightforward modifiers, and the ones you’re likeliest to find easy-breezy.
the tall child the red balloon
We go to school daily.
They have an exam tomorrow.
Now, it’s still possible to get mixed up with adjective or adverb modifiers.
Word order is important!
If you talk about the red child’s balloon, you’re calling the child red rather than
the balloon.
But if you remember, as a rule of thumb, to keep the descriptor next to the word it modifies—that
is, next to the word it describes—then you should be able to avoid issues of inadvertently
red children with tall balloons.
Where things get more complicated is when you have a whole phrase or clause as a modifier.
The tall child who has a red balloon saw a friend.
In that sentence, it’s really important that the clause “who has a red balloon”
come right after “tall child” — if you move that clause, you change the whole meaning
of the sentence!
The tall child saw a friend who has a red balloon.
See what I did there?
Now the friend has the balloon!
That’s just not right.
This brings me to the topic of misplaced modifiers.
A modifier is considered “misplaced” when it isn’t near the thing it modifies (as
in that sentence with the friend and the red balloon).
Here’s another example:
The gold child’s bracelet clasp broke.
Just what or who is gold in this sentence?
The child or the bracelet?
Modifiers matter, because they can change the whole meaning of a sentence.
Groucho Marx had a joke about a misplaced modifier:
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
Here’s another example:
Eating pancakes quickly allayed my hunger.
Now, are we saying that the act of eating quickly—in a hurried manner—allayed my
hunger?
Or are we saying that eating pancakes allayed my hunger quickly—after not too long?
If it’s the latter, and I think it must be, then we need a new word order:
Eating pancakes allayed my hunger quickly.
Now, what about when the thing that a modifier modifies isn’t named in the sentence at
all?
How is that possible?
Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that it IS possible, and it happens all the time,
and it’s called a dangling modifier.
(And while we’re keeping score, that was a run-on sentence!)
A dangling modifier kind of leaves you hanging.
Think about a sentence like this one: Running through the forest, the fresh air reinvigorated
me.
Wait, what?
Who, exactly, is running through the forest?
At the moment, it’s the fresh air.
Which doesn’t even have legs!
The subject should be the speaker: In this sentence, I am the one running through the
forest.
So we’d have to rework the sentence to make sure that the modifier is modifying the right
thing.
Running through the forest, I found the fresh air reinvigorating.
Alternatively, we can change the modifier to be a clause:
As I was running through the forest, the fresh air reinvigorated me.
Let’s try another one:
Hugging my friends after the race, my thrill was palpable.
Is the thrill the subject, or is the runner?
Should be the runner.
Thrills can’t hug, but runners can.
At The Princeton Review, we see these modifier errors all the time.
You’ll find yourself being tested on your knowledge of misplaced modifiers on a whole
bunch of standardized tests, such as the GMAT, GRE, SAT, ACT, and more.
Plus, you don’t want to be the person who inadvertently dresses elephants in pajamas.
Say what you mean, and mean what you say.
Modify accordingly.
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