Essentially, when a sentence starts off with a phrase that has an action or description in it, the subject of that phrase needs to come immediately after it. Here's an example:
Having finished dinner, it was time for bed.
Yowzers -- that's not right. Look at the introductory phrase "having finished dinner." Who or what has finished dinner? Well, we don't know from the sentence, but we do know that the subject needs to be a person. Mary finished dinner, Bedilia finished dinner, someone finished dinner.
What we do know is that "It" did not finish dinner (how can an “it” eat dinner???), but "it" is the first word after the introductory phrase. That's wrong. Plain old wrong. So we need to fix it.
Having finished dinner, Mary went to bed.
This works. We have introductory phrase with an action – finishing dinner. Who or what finished dinner? Mary. Is “Mary” the first word after the introductory phrase? Yup. OK, problem solved.
Let's try another one.
Getting out of the shower, the doorbell rang.
We have an introductory phrase with an action or description: “Getting out of the shower.” We need a subject. Who or what was getting out of the shower? Well, the first word after the phrase is “the doorbell.” Was the doorbell getting out of the shower? No? Then the sentence is wrong. A fix might be:
Getting out of the shower, James heard the doorbell ring.
Who was getting out of the shower? James. Ah...the first word after that introductory phrase is the subject of it. Yay-- that works.
FYI: Dangling modifiers can occur at the ends of sentences but nearly always happen at the beginning.
Want to learn more about this? (And who wouldn't??) Check out the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). It's a fantastic resource for all grammar quandaries:
The main site:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
The dangling modifier page:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_dangmod.html
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