Back to our example. Do you remember the rule? The modifier word, in this case ‘only’, should be as near to the word it modifies as possible. You told the detective that you ran, you didn’t crawl, walk, or anything else. If you didn’t want him to think that you might have been saying you weren’t anywhere else, you should have said, “I ran only to the shop”. That tells him you weren’t at the crime scene or anywhere else.

Many writers, whether it is through ignorance or laziness, use the word ‘only’ far too much. The rule about modifiers being close to the modified word has been internalized by English speakers and when ‘only’ is used out of place, a reader’s internal grammar police will appear to distract them.

That/which

The rule indicates that the word ‘that’ is used for restrictive clauses while ‘which’ is for non-restrictive clauses. And, yes, if you knew the difference, this wouldn’t trip you up. Thankfully, there is an easy rule and a couple of examples that will help you.

Example one – “Countries that have no coastline have trade problems”

Example two – “China, which is the most populated country, is home to the panda”.

Now the rule.

Remove the clause and the main message is still in the sentence – that is a non-restrictive clause. For example:

“Countries have trade problems” – ‘that have no coastline’ removed.

“China is home to the panda” – ‘which is the most populated country’ removed.

You can see the difference – if the information contained in the clause is required, use ‘that’. If it isn’t required, use ‘which’ and use commas to set the clause off.

-ing Words

You can easily confuse your readers in two ways with -ing words. Often, they introduce something called a dangling modifier. Most of these can easily be dealt with if you consider an -ing opener as a warning. Here’s an example:

“ Patting the baby’s back, he burped”.

The modifier is ‘patting’. Grammatically, in this example, it modifies ‘he’. What is written is that the man patting the baby’s back burped while he was doing it. Yes, that could happen but the most likely scenario is that the baby burped while he was patting his back.

If a warning bell goes off when you see -ing at the start of a sentence, make sure that the sentence subject is what should have been modified.

If your -ing word doesn’t lead to a dangling modifier, it means that something is happening while another action I will talk about is happening.

Let’s say, for example, that:

“Wrinkling his brow, the hiker tried to get the sweat off his brow”.

This is fine because the wrinkling was done while something else, the sweatlessness, was happening.

What if I said:

“Putting down my glass, I turned around”.

I have indicated several things – perhaps a spilled drink, a twisted ankle, stepping on a cat, simply because I turned around at the same time as I put my glass down.

What I probably should have said is something like:

“I put my glass down and turned around” or something like that.

Punctuation

Punctuation is another area where many writers fall down.

Quotation Marks

These also serve two purposes – they either enclose a direct quotation or they set titles apart, such as magazine articles, songs, etc.

Direct quotations enclose actual words that were said by someone whereas an indirect quotation reports something some said and should not be enclosed in quotation marks.

For example:

The writer said, “I wish I knew what this meant” – this is a direct quotation and requires quotation marks, whereas:

The writer said that she wished she knew what this meant – this is an indirect quotation and no quotation marks are needed.

As a finishing note, all other punctuation should go inside the quotation marks.

Do not use quotation marks for any other reason!