Day 265: Place descriptive prepositional phrases carefully.

Groucho Marx once made the witticism “I shot an elephant in my pajamas.” The prepositional phrase “in my pajamas” seems to describe the elephant, leading to a very strange visual image.

Like most descriptive words and phrases, descriptive prepositional phrases tend to describe the thing to which they are closest. The reader may be able to figure out what you mean by the context of the sentence, but this asks the reader to do too much work to understand your meaning.

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To make sentences clearer, and to prevent odd interpretations, we must evaluate whether the prepositional phrase will be associated with the correct word or something else. Consider this sentence.

“I leaned away from the desk in my office chair.”

This sentence implies that the desk was in the chair, not me. This occurs because the prepositional phrase “in my office chair” is closer to “desk” than to “I.”

To fix these two humorous sentences (and to make their meanings accurate), we can move the prepositional phrases as follows.

“In my pajamas, I shot an elephant.”

“Sitting in my office chair, I leaned away from the desk.”

These may still seem a bit awkward, and they can benefit from further revision, but they do accurately communicate what is happening.