Bite-Sized Line Editing: Participial Phrases
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When I’m deep in the weeds of a line edit, I’ve got my eye out for a wide assortment of critters—roving apostrophes, stilted phrasing, and word echoes being just three of them.
Line editing, even more than copyediting, is an edit that focuses on a writer’s style, so I also spend a lot of time looking for patterns.
Now, every writer has certain patterns they tend to fall into, but these are not necessarily elements that are “wrong.” Instead, these are tendencies that the writer should be aware of in their own work. When you can see your own patterns more clearly, you can make better choices about how you’d like to express yourself on the page.
It can tricky to know where to start with line editing when you’re doing it yourself, so we’ll be breaking up some of our line editing advice into bite-sized blogs, each one featuring a different element that you can look for in your own work.
Today’s topic? Participial phrases.
What is a participial phrase?
Don’t run off just yet—I’m not about to give you a grammar lecture! To keep it short and sweet, a participle is a verb that’s been given a different job. Instead of working like a usual verb that expresses an action or state of being, a participle modifies a noun or pronoun.
Many participles end in -ing, like “dancing” or “alley-ooping” (which is, surprisingly, a word), though there are some others as well. “Dancing” is usually a verb, but in the case of “dancing queen,” it’s used to describe what kind of queen, so it’s a participle.
Participial phrases are simply a combination of words that modify the subject of the sentence, and they usually start with the participle. I’ll give you a few examples, highlighting the participial phrase:
Having been a ranger for most of his life, he knew to keep an arrow at the ready when walking the woods.
Shaken and shivering, she stumbled on in the rain.
The creature slipped beneath the door, slithering inside as easily as a wisp of smoke.
Look for repetition
When line editing, the most common pattern I find with participial phrases are those that are added at the end, like the previous example. They can appear with dialogue tags, too:
“I love when you call my name like that,” she said, stepping closer.
I believe that these are so frequently used because they do a grand job of connecting actions more closely together when you don’t want to start a new sentence (like a character’s action while speaking, as in my last example), and they’re also great for elaborating on the point you’ve just made or giving more information. However, if too many sentences have the same construction, you can create a feeling of repetition that bogs readers down or becomes distracting. While you’re not repeating words, the repeated sentence structure gives the writing a predictable feel and risks losing a reader’s attention.
Just take a look at this short passage to see what I mean:
The creature slipped beneath the door, slithering inside as easily as a wisp of smoke. The travelers huddled over their ales by the fire paid no heed to the shadow, excusing the chill in the air by reminding themselves the sun was going down.
“I ain’t never backed down,” a woman close to the fire declared, slamming her tankard down. “I ain’t starting now.”
Participial phrases can hide a little better in longer prose, but it’s just as repetitive as an exchange like this:
“I love when you call my name like that,” she said, stepping closer.
“Like what?” he asked, teasing.
“Oh, you know exactly what I mean.” She laughed, lightly punching his arm.
Look through your writing to see if you’re overusing participial phrases. Searching for -ing can be a good place to start. When they’re being used repetitively, I most often spot them at the end of sentences, but they can also show up at the start of sentences too.
Make sure you’re modifying the right subject
Participial phrases can be a great source of unintentional humor in your writing if you lose track of the subject of your sentence. Misplaced or dangling modifiers occur when the participial phrase isn’t describing (modifying) the right thing, which often result in interesting mental visuals:
Jumping down the stairs three at a time, her heart pounded furiously.
(we don’t typically want to see a heart doing anything outside its person’s body!)
The archer’s grip was steady on the bow, taking a deep breath.
(I’m not sure how a grip would take a breath)
Sometimes this is a matter of two images blurring together without distinguishing them for the reader, such as in the case of the archer. Both parts of the sentence are referring to the archer so they feel connected, but grammatically, the subject of the sentence is the “grip,” not the “archer.” In both of these examples, you can see how the true subject of the sentence doesn’t appear in the sentence at all.
To correct these examples, we have to put the subject back in. Revisions might look like this:
Her heart pounded furiously as she jumped down the stairs three at a time.
The archer’s grip was steady on the bow, and he took a deep breath.
Read through your work to make sure that your sentences are including their true subject rather than giving the action to someone or something else (like inanimate objects!).
Punctuation tips
Lastly, when you’re line editing your work, you can check that your participial phrases are punctuated correctly. There are three things to keep in mind when deciding whether a phrase should be set off with a comma or not:
· Does the participial phrase appear at the beginning of a sentence? If so, it needs a comma after it.
Shaken and shivering, she stumbled on in the rain.
· Is it interrupting the sentence with nonessential information? If so, it needs commas before and after it.
He explored deeper into the abandoned cathedral, crawling over piles of debris, and eventually found himself in the sanctuary.
· Does the participial phrase come at the end of the sentence and it’s separated from the word it modifies? If so, it needs a comma before it.
“Like what?” he asked, teasing.
And there you have it, your crash course on participial phrases. This is just one element to keep an eye out for while line editing. Stay tuned for our next installment on bite-sized line editing!
You can also read more about line editing on our blog.
Thanks to Mykhaylo Kopyt via Unsplash for the photo!
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