One of the aspects of good writing is getting the various parts of a sentence to agree with one another, and a common mistake is starting off with an introductory clause that doesn’t agree.
Take for instance, the following sentence: ‘On getting up, a pile of work was waiting for me.’ Though you may know what the writer means here, you can also rightly observe that piles of work do not get up. It was the writer who got up, and the pile of work that was waiting. ‘On getting up’, or whatever comes at the beginning in a similar clause, needs to agree with what comes next. In this kind of construction, whoever or whatever is the subject (that is, doing the action) of the second part of the sentence needs to be the subject of the first part too. So a simple correction in this instance would be: ‘On getting up, I found a pile of work waiting for me.’ ‘I’ is the subject both of ‘getting up’ and of ‘found’. An alternative way of saying the same thing would be to specify a different subject in each part of the sentence, instead of using the ‘on’ construction. So you could say ‘I (subject) got up; a pile of work (subject) was waiting for me.’
Other examples:
Wrong (unless your computer can read): ‘While reading my e-mail, my computer crashed.’
Right: ‘While I was reading my e-mail, my computer crashed.’
Right: ‘While reading my e-mail, I realised my computer had crashed.’
Wrong: ‘On going for a walk, it began to rain.’ (‘It’ is not going for a walk, I am.)
Right: ‘On going for a walk, I noticed it was beginning to rain.’
Right: ‘I set off for a walk, but it began to rain.’
Wrong: ‘After learning how to write good ads, my income increased.’ (My income did not do the learning, I did.)
Right: ‘After learning how to write good ads, I increased my income.’
Right: ‘I learnt how to write good ads and, before long, my income increased.’
Happy agreeing!
Virginia Rounding is a published writer whose website of
Internet Resources for Writers looks at additional ways for
writers to earn money, in the hope of making it possible
for them to keep writing without having to resort either to
full-time employment or to destitution. For a selection of
free resources or to subscribe to her new ezine Poetry
Competition Updates, go to
http://www.virginiarounding.com/links.html
