Wednesday, January 09, 2013

spot the error

What's wrong with this sentence (found here)?

With razor-toothed suckers and eyes the size of dinner plates, tales of this creature have been around since ancient times.

You get only one guess.


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8 comments:

Charles said...

That's an easy one: dangling modifier. The tales do not have "razor-toothed suckers and eyes the size of dinner plates."

Elisson said...

Charles beat me to it.

SJHoneywell said...

Too easy, man. I knew it at the midpoint of the sentence.

Kevin Kim said...

Journalists never cease to amaze me with their writing acumen.

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Easy. As noted above, it's a dangling modifier, so it needs to be attached to a subject that dangles. Tales don't dangle, or shouldn't, though they can leave the reader dangling.

The problem, obviously, is the spelling of the subject: "tales." It ought to be "tails." Now, the subject also dangles, and therefore fits the dangling modifier.

The sentence describes a prehistoric monster with a nondecomposable, regenerating tail armed with razor-toothed suckers and littered with eyes the size of dinner plates! Not the sort of critter to sneak up on . . .

Jeffery Hodges

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Kstylick said...

aye. Yeah the 'tales' :) easy mistake.

Charles said...

In fairness to USA Today, that particular sentence is in a quote pulled from Discovery News.

Kevin Kim said...

Charles,

Yes, indeed, but it wasn't at Discovery that I found the sentence. In fact, I never followed that link back to the original source.

BTW, I did sneak a peek at the first two paragraphs of Black Flower.