Parsing Participles That Act Like Adjectives to Better Understand Them and How They Help Your Writing
By: Karen Degroot Carter
Tags: Editing, Productivity, Education, Self Improvement, Writing

WRITING WELL

Parsing Participles That Act Like Adjectives to Better Understand Them and How They Help Your Writing

Photo by Elli Gerra on Flickr.com

Maybe it’s the intimidating word “participle” that creates a block in my mind related to this particular grammatical term. No clues arise when I see the word “participle” or “participles.” Luckily, and as with most grammatical terms, certain participles can be pretty simple to understand once you take a good look at them.

Definitions of the term “participle” are not always simple to understand, though, as different types of participles exist. With regard to participles that act like adjectives, I prefer the explanation provided by the dependable Purdue Owl website. I then simplify that even further to: A participle can express action or a state of being (as a verb does) and modify a noun or pronoun (as an adjective does). While such participles usually end in “ing” or “ed,” they sometimes end in “en,” “d,” “t,” “n,” or “ne.”

Participial examples

To form a participle that acts like an adjective ending in “ing,” for example, simply add “ing” to a verb as in “burning” or “jumping” and use it in a sentence such as “They raced to douse the burning debris” or “The boy tried to catch the jumping frog.” More than one participle can be used in a sentence as in “Laughing, the boy tried to catch the jumping frog.” In this example, “Laughing” modifies the noun “the boy” while “jumping” modifies the noun “frog.” Using two participles this way allows you to describe the main subject of your sentence before (and in addition to) describing what your subject is doing related the object, which is also described by an effective participle.

Other examples of such participles include “encouraged” (“ed” added to the verb “encourage”), “forsaken” (“en” added to the verb “forsake”), “tired” (“d” added to the verb “tire”), “dealt” (“t” added to the verb “deal”), “seen” (“n” added to the verb “see”), and “gone” (“ne” added to the verb “go”).

Regardless of the ending used in such a participle, the important thing is the placement of the noun or pronoun the participle modifies. In our above example, “the boy” immediately follows “Laughing,” and “frog” immediately follows “jumping.” Such construction helps your readers quickly and easily understand who or what is doing what. Read on to see what happens when that isn’t the case — and how to fix such poorly constructed sentences.

Participial problems

Consider the following sorry sentence: “Pedaling down the street, the rain fell all around Jim.” While “Pedaling” in this case is a participle, it’s unclear what it’s modifying. And while “the rain” is a noun, it can’t possibly pedal anything. For this reason, a problem was created when “the rain” was placed immediately after “Pedaling down the street” instead of the correct word.

How to fix such a sentence? “Jim” at the end of our example sentence hints that someone named Jim should be the main subject, not “rain.” For this reason, the sentence could be correctly rewritten this way: “Pedaling down the street, Jim got soaked by the falling rain.” You could also rewrite the sentence to make “soaked” the participle as in “Soaked, Jim pedaled through the rain.”

Either suggested correction is much better than the original sentence. This issue is also clear in a sentence like “Tired and sad, the store was the last place she wanted to be.” Since a store can’t be “tired” or “sad,” look for another noun (or in this case a pronoun) that can follow “Tired and sad” and make sense. “Tired and sad, she found the store was the last place she wanted to be,” for example, is a great option.