Dear Legal Writer, Beware of DANGLING modifiers. They’ll wreak havoc on your credibility.

Example: “While reviewing the merger agreement, my coffee spilled.”

—Careless coffee!

Always reviewing my contracts.

👉 Classic dangling modifier: the wrong noun is “doing” the action.
It’s not the coffee reviewing the agreement, it’s you.

But because “the coffee” is the first noun after the comma, the sentence reads that the coffee is doing the reviewing.

Options to fix:

✅ While I was reviewing the merger agreement, my coffee spilled.

✅ While reviewing the merger agreement, I spilled my coffee.

Takeaway:

Don’t let your modifiers act unsupervised by the nouns they modify.

💌 Amanda

#DearLegalWriter