On the Second

   A PDF of Misplaced Modifiers: Using Humor to Teach Complicated Grammar Rules Andrew Pudewa’s conference talk, â€Å"Humor in Teaching and Speaking† A video link to joke clips from the SSS The first lesson and handouts to Structure and Style for Students Free shipping A chance to win one of twelve Structure and Style for Students packages Misplaced Modifiers: Word Order Matters Welcome to the second day of our Twelve Days of Christmas event! We’ve all seen these sentences before, posted in funny memes on Facebook or even appearing in our printed news reports. What are they? Described as misplaced modifiers, these sentences feature words, phrases, or clauses that are awkwardly placed and often generate amusing images in our minds. The term â€Å"modify† means â€Å"to change,† and modifiers do exactly that: They change an otherwise bland sentence into one that provides more detail or description, enabling the reader to better imagine the action of that sentence. But there’s a caveat. Place the modifier too far away from the part of the sentence that it’s intended to modify, and you end up modifying some other section of the sentence, resulting in an improper but often humorous sentence instead. While misplaced modifiers can be constructed out of many different types of phrases and clauses, perhaps the most obvious scenario where new writers will inadvertently create one is when they attempt to write the #4 sentence opener. A #4 sentence is a participial phrase opener. Anticipating this, Teaching Writing: Structure and Style states, â€Å"The important thing about writing a true #4 is to (1) have a comma, and (2) be sure that the thing after the comma is the thing doing the -inging† (181). The example provided in the text shares this misplaced modifier: â€Å"Running down the hall, a banana peel caused Joe to slip and crash into the principal† (181). The reader can easily picture the scene: a large banana peel sprinting down a hallway perhaps pushes Joe, causing his unfortunate slip and crash into the principal. It’s definitely chuckle-inducing! Capturing some of her own comical examples and putting them on paper, IEW’s very own graphic artist, Laura Holmes,  has created her own imaginative and amusing cartoons that feature some â€Å"misplaced modifiers† in full comedic glory. Originally sharing them on Facebook and through Instagram, we have gathered them for the first time all together in this ebook so that you can enjoy them and easily share them with your own students. Pull from the book and use these cartoon examples with your students. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and these images are a funny and fabulous way to draw your students’ attention to the fact that, indeed, word order does matter. The PDF booklet, while being funny and charming, is not the only gift we have to send your way. We also are excited to send you Andrew Pudewa’s conference talk, â€Å"Humor in Teaching and Speaking.† Hear from the â€Å"funny guy† himself how critically important it is to infuse your instructional time with humor. And to see how Andrew delivers his trademark humor to actual students, we are also sharing video clips of jokes culled from Structure and Style for Students. Throughout the event, we are also including the first lesson and handouts to Structure and Style for Students, along with free shipping.    On behalf of all of us at IEW, I wish you all a most merry and joyous Christmas, Jennifer Mauser IEW Blog Content Editor Be sure to enter our daily drawing for a chance to win one of twelve Structure and Style for Students (SSS) packages.  Enter here.    Jennifer Mauser  has always loved reading and writing and received a B.A. in English from the University of Kansas in 1991. Once she and her husband had children, they decided to homeschool, and she put all her training to use in the home. In addition to homeschooling her children, Jennifer teaches IEW classes out of her home, coaches budding writers via  email,  and tutors students who struggle with dyslexia.