A couple of cautions about using PP’s: They should refer clearly to a noun or pronoun in the sentence. And they should not be placed too far away from the words they modify. This can be awkward and confusing. See the difference in the sentences below.
Inspired by the beautiful spring day, I walked to work.
I walked to work, inspired by the beautiful spring day .
The PP (“inspired by the beautiful spring day ”) describes the “I” so it is much more elegant and direct when used in juxtaposition with “I” than it is trailing after “work.”
In some cases, writers neglect to include the noun or pronoun being modified. The result leaves the reader hanging:
Curling my toes and squinting, the doctor prepared to puncture my arm with a needle.
Obviously, the doctor is not curling his or her toes. This is a dangling participial phrase. The word “I” is missing:
Curling my toes and squinting, I waited for the doctor to puncture my arm with a needle.
As I sit here rereading one of your older blogs, thinking how much I am in your debt, and wanting to thank you for reminding me of this useful technique, fearing that I may be interrupted soon by my wife and dragged off to breakfast, preventing me from properly expressing my thanks, having wasted too much time on this overwrought example of over-participialization, I pause.
Whew. That took some thought.
Soon after reading your blog posting on the use of participles, I cycled through the novel I am revising and sprinkled in a healthy amount of participle phrases. It has definitely improved my novel. Thank you.
Occasionally as I have continued to polish and revise sections of my novel, often changing a sentence by adding a participial phrase, I discover that I have ended up with two sentences in a row that begin with participial phrases, sometimes both gerund phrases. Is this too much? It looks so to me, so I sometimes change one of the participial phrases to a prepositional phrase. What is your advice about the overuse of participial phrases?
P.S. For those of us who like to cycle back through your blog postings, looking for ones that we have not yet read, it would help if you had your “previous” and “next” hot links at the top of your blog posting pages as well as at the bottom.
I think anything can be overdone. I like to read my writing aloud to see how it sounds and if it doesn’t flow right, I reorganize. Good idea about the buttons. I will suggest it to our IT person next time we are in touch.