Slippery Syntax Can Turn Sentences Into Hedgehogs

Every lover of "Alice in Wonderland" will recall the most remarkable game of croquet ever played. The balls were live hedgehogs and the mallets were flamingos. Every time Alice prepared to take a swing, her hedgehog unrolled itself and silently slipped away.

That is English syntax for you.

This was a hedgehog sentence, from The Associated Press: "Federal wildlife managers have no plans to capture and move a pack of wolves that killed a hunting dog back to Yellowstone National Park."

A Florida newspaper explained in July that the state's computer pornography law "makes it illegal to enter or transmit sexually explicit images of a minor using a computer." Or using a typewriter either.

From The Winchester (Va.) Star: "Trabue, 35, also pleaded nolo contendere to two other charges of attempting to commit sodomy in Winchester Circuit Court." An unlikely venue.

You will see that every time the reporter took a swing at his sentence, the prepositional phrase crept away. The only escape from such a syntactical scrum is to hit "delete" and start over.

From the Kerrville (Texas) Daily Times: "In a horticulture report, Mary Fletcher recommended that nandinas be pruned one-third at a time during the Ingram Garden Club meeting."

In Darlington, S.C., The News and Press carried a bellicose item: "Darlington County school board members are not taking accusations by the U.S. Department of Justice that they have shortchanged a court-ordered magnet school by failing to adequately fund it lying down."

In Cranston, R.I., Diana Ilic formed a club for fat women. "She rented out a hall, got a few friends to come, then stuck handbills advertising a dance for large women on cars parked outside area nightclubs." Might be better than the show inside.

This came from the Toronto bureau of The Buffalo (N.Y.) News: "The immigration agent found copies of Playboy issues in which the woman was pictured in her briefcase." Seems an odd photo for Playboy.

Some syntactical horrors emerge from dangled phrases or clauses. The same Toronto reporter filed a first-person story last October: "After four months of covering Paul Bernardo's `trial of the century' for The Buffalo News, the Geraldo Rivera talk show wanted me to discuss the crimes of Bernardo ..."

Here the trouble was that the opening phrase had no subject to cling to. The reporter would have been better off with the passive voice: "After four months of covering the trial, I was asked by the Geraldo Rivera talk show ..."

The AP filed a story in April on a survey of drug use in different occupations: "Broken down by sex, men employed in construction, restaurants and bars, entertainment and janitorial services had the highest rates of drug use."

Now, some carpenters and bartenders probably are broken down by sex, an interesting thought, but the AP's problem lay in the opening phrase: It was an orphan. The reporter meant to say that "Broken down by sex, the data indicated that men employed in construction," and so forth.

This dangling clause appeared in May in the Bulletin of the American Association of Retired Persons. The item concerned 68-year-old Mary Andes: "After getting her pilot's license 15 years ago, Freedom Air, a small carrier on Guam where she lives, offered her a job." The reporter could have wiggled out of that snarl by a recasting: "Fifteen years after she won her pilot's license, Freedom Air, a small carrier," etc., etc.

One more Horrid Example, this one from the Binghamton (N.Y.) Press & Sun-Bulletin: "Ten days after disappearing, state troopers have suspended an active search for a man missing since floods washed his car away." The reporter might have reworked her lead to say, "State troopers have suspended an active search for a man missing since floods washed his car away 10 days ago." There's always some way out of a dingle-dangle sentence.

Syntactical traps lie in photo captions. This from the AP: "Jesse Jackson listens to a tribute for the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died this year in a plane crash in Croatia, at the Democratic National Convention."

The AP provided this caption: "Art Modell, owner of the Baltimore Ravens, talks with Mayor Kurt Schmoke, right, after announcing that the Baltimore NFL franchise will be known as the Ravens on Friday in Baltimore." On Sunday they'll be known as the grackles.

If children were taught diagramming in the fourth or fifth grade, they wouldn't write hedgehog sentences when they grow up. Absent that useful instruction, writers can always read their own stuff aloud. It usually works.

(Copyright 1996, Universal Press Syndicate)