Dangling Modifiers and How to Correct Them
Only one of the 4 following sentences is grammatically correct. Which one is it?
Rocking the beach in my muscle suit, the ladies thought I was buffed.
Sick with the flu, four doses of Tylenol a day was prescribed by my doctor.
Hiding beneath the bridge and swatting flies with his grotesque fingernails, the giant monster belched.
Convinced of my superior speaking powers, my argument manipulated my audience to my desired effect.
Let's fix the incorrect sentences:
Rocking the beach in my muscle suit, the ladies thought I was buffed.
The ladies thought I was buffed because I was rocking the beach in my muscle suit.
Sick with the flu, four doses of Tylenol a day was prescribed by my doctor.
Sick with the flu, I had to take my doctor's prescribed 4 Tylenol doses a day.
Convinced of my superior speaking powers, my argument manipulated my audience to my desired effect.
Convinced of my superior speaking powers, I knew my argument would manipulate my audience to my desired effect.
Let's correct the following dangling modifiers:
Tanning for my trip to Tahiti, the vacation looks promising.
Tanning for my trip to Tahiti, I am encouraged at the prospects of a good vacation.
Having read The Chocolate War, the assignment looks difficult.
Having read The Chocolate War, I find the assignment difficult.
Late for work, a suspension had to be drafted for Mr. Winkle T Tardy.
Late for work, Mr. Winkle T Tardy was handed a suspension form.
With sharp teeth, the bowl of dog food was devoured quickly.
With sharp teeth, my dog devoured the bowl of dog food efficaciously.
Not understanding grammar, the grammar quiz seemed difficult.
Not understanding grammar, Lara found the quiz difficult.
Suffering a nasty hyena bite in the buttocks, medicinal iodine was applied liberally.
Suffering a nasty hynea bite in the buttocks, I applied liberal amounts of medicinal iodine to my gaping wound.
In a 5-page essay use extended definition and classification to analyze Predictably Irrational. Develop a thesis that defines the term "predictably irrational" by breaking it down into 4 or 5 categories (your mapping components) that you will illustrate with examples that ARE NOT IN THE BOOK.
Paragraph One: Introduction
Paragraph Two: Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping components
Paragraphs Three-Nine: Illustrate and elaborate your mapping components
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Last page: Works Cited page with no fewer than 3 sources
Lexicon
1. Cognitive dissonance: Two people look at the same thing in two completely different ways, like a President’s State of the Union Speech. See page 200.
2. Packaging Inflation: The better we package product, the more “upscale” we think it is: coffee, wine, popcorn, etc.
3. Preconceived loathing: Tell us about an ingredient that we think we don’t like before we consume the product and that knowledge will diminish our tasting experience, like the vinegar in the beer. Don’t tell us and we don’t mind.
4. The relativity of junk: A garage sale is offering junk until that junk is labeled “American primitivism” or some other label that suggests it is a collector’s item. See page 207.
5. The power of euphemism and embellished language to increase expectations: Frozen chicken with store-bought sauce or Asian-style ginger-glazed chicken simmering in shitake mushrooms.
6. Brand recognition: The inflation of expectations and the “experience.” Coke fares better than Pepsi unless the comparison is blind. The name of a brand can even stimulate the production of dopamine.
7. Hedonic value: actual experience of pleasure divorced from falsely inflated or deflated expectations.
8. The deleterious (harmful) and advantageous effects of stereotypes: We tend to live up to, or down from, the stereotype we have of ourselves. See page 213.
9. The pulchritudinous stereotype: Pretty people are “airheads.”
10. The double-edged sword of ambience: Great surroundings enhance the experience if the food, for example, is good, but the raised expectations make mediocre food seem all the worse. See page 219.
11. The blindness of high expectations: We hear a famous classical symphony and we refuse to believe that individual musicians missed certain notes or that the whole symphony in general did a bad performance.
12. The placebo effect: Trick the mind into believing you’re receiving treatment (pills, phony medical procedures, how-to books) and you get better. Placebo comes from the Latin term “I shall please.” See page 228. The essence of the placebo effect is the power of belief and the body’s changes during your expectations of positive change. A super drink will make you train harder in the gym because you believe it will. A study group (in which you waste a lot of time socializing) makes you perform better on the test because you BELIEVE a study group prepares you better.
13. The care and process of going to a doctor stimulates the internal healing process. Someone is paying you attention. Someone is nurturing your ego. See page 231.
14. Negative placebo: A voodoo doll that will kill you will make you die because you believe it will (causing a heart attack?)
15. The placebo effect is often believed to be real because people cannot distinguish correlation from causation. For example, a cold medicine doesn’t cause your cold away; your cold went away on its own.
16. Placebo inflation: The higher the cost of the placebo, the more effective it is. The psychology is, “I paid that much for it; it had better work.”
Part Two. Causes of Cynicism and the Erosion of Trust Lowers Expectations (Chapter 12)
1. We become numb to “free offers.”
2. We become numb to hyperbole, exaggerated claims of effectiveness.
3. We become numb to the sheer ubiquity of advertising.
4. We become cynical to “spinners,” silver-tongued BS artists and pundits who shape reality to fit their view of the world.
Part Three. The Danger of Expectations Based on Misguided Preconceptions
1. Trusting a reference because the person is a friend of another friend or of family. Your trust can be taken advantage of in a business transaction: hiring a contractor, a plumber, an electrician, etc. And you end up getting swindled.
2. Your preconception of marriage is that you are now entering a new world, that of a goody box.
3. Your preconception of marriage is that once you get married you will instantly become mature when in fact you will be the same person you were before, a person saddled with the same personality defects and as such you are doomed to disappointment.
4. You heard that a college instructor is “easy” but your definition of “easy” is different than the person who told you this instructor is easy. In fact, you may find this instructor to be rather difficult.
5. You’re a senior in high school and you take your date to an expensive restaurant for the Senior Prom. Your expectation is that expensive prices on the menu will translate into satisfying your appetite when in fact, the diminutive portions leave you so hungry that after taking your date to the restaurant you have to stop at Jack in the Box.
6. You rejected the flirtations of “Mary,” a girl you knew in high school because Mary didn’t belong to the cool clique and as such she COULD NOT be attractive. Instead, you only went after the stuck-up girls who belonged to the chic, exclusive groups. Now looking back on it, Mary was more gorgeous than the mediocre girls you longed for. You were blind to Mary’s beauty and blind to the other girls’ mediocrity because of your expectations based on belonging to the cool cliques. You see Mary ten years later and she is even more GORGEOUS than you remember. Now she’s married (to one lucky dude) and all you can do is go home and pimp-slap yourself.
7. You look at your college degree as a panacea, an answer to all your problems. However, a degree without adequate social networking and making inroads through internships proves worthless and you end up working at Taco Bell.
8. You wear your brand new $1,800 watch to the company Christmas party and expect to be deluged with compliments. But to your dismay, no one seems to notice evidenced by the way everyone at the party ignores you. Your watch proves to be worth a BIG ZERO in terms of its power to create popularity. You go home from the party with the taste of stale beer on your lips, dramatically fall onto your bed, curl into the fetal position, and cry yourself to sleep.
9. Two Albanian men escape their hideously tyrannical and impoverished country and cross the border into Italy. The Italian police find the two Albanian men, in tattered clothes and half starving, and they ask the men why they risked their lives trying to escape. One of the men explains they saw an Italian TV commercial on satellite dish featuring a cat eating cat food with a diamond necklace around its neck. “If cats enjoy such luxury,” the man said, “then surely people enjoy the good life here.”
10. You take a ten-week self-defense course in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and at the end of the course after receiving your certificate you believe you’re a “prize fighter” so you get a bit sauced at Patrick Malloy’s and start behaving belligerently at the 300-pound bouncer and find, to your chagrin, that your self-defense certificate is worthless as the bouncer throws you on your butt and you’re left on the sidewalk with everyone on Pier Avenue laughing and mocking you.
Part Four. In a paragraph, profile a person you know who is (or was) misguided by false expectations.
Part Five. An A Introductory Paragraph About the Pain of Unrealistic Expectations, Followed by Transition, and Thesis
Evisu, True Religion, G-Star, Slim Flare, Citizens of Humanity, 7 For All Mankind, Diesel . . . I found I could not sleep at night unless I recited names of fabulous jeans, jeans that cost between $200-400, jeans that boasted of denim so soft, so textured, so resplendent, so magical, so distinctive, and so empowering that they put all other jeans to shame and rendered the wearers of those inferior jeans pariahs unworthy of my company. The glorious name-brand jeans I am speaking of had almost supernatural powers so that simply wearing them would afford me membership to a special club, a high-brow coterie of people in-the-know, people who could not be bothered by the rest of mundane humanity.
This was not always so. For many years designer jeans, especially acid wash jeans and jeans that featured lightening bolts on the back pocket, were considered passé, low-brow, and vulgar as a more minimalist approach to jeans, like 501 Levis, was considered the utmost expression in good taste. But the jean makers brainstormed and found ways to make designer jeans cool again. They used sheer fabrics, cool logos, such as gorillas and a smiling Buddha, and “distressed” the jeans by shredding them with cheese graters, scratching them with sandpaper, and shooting bullets at them, so that the wearer looked like he had just doubled as Bruce Willis’ stuntman in his latest blockbuster. Designers jeans were chic again. And to keep their mystique, the marketers often drove them underground, keeping them away from mainstream stores so that if one wanted to keep updated on the new designer jeans, one would have to join a secret society of jean fetishists.
This underground designer jean society often communicated on Internet message boards, chat sites, and met monthly at swank cocktail parties where they would show-off their jeans to others whose jean expertise made them qualified to truly appreciate the way the jeans showcased their svelte thighs, cupped and massaged their rock-hard buttocks, and delineated the appropriate, eye-brow-raising serpentine curves.
Of course, ordinary people lacked the imagination and refined sensibility to seek out and wear the designer jeans I am speaking of. Rather, only a rare breed, a self-described cognoscenti, coveted these elite jeans. They were people who were plugged-in to a mysterious network through which their belonging entitled them to know everything that went on in this world that “really mattered” before it “went mainstream.” They had, for example, unique access to special underground warehouses in the garment district where they could buy jeans as rare and mysterious as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were remote locations so secret they had to be blindfolded and escorted down several spiral stairs to a dank basement where an old lady with moth-ball breath would rudely shove the pair of designer jeans into their hands after they gave her a wad of cash. They weren’t even allowed to try the jeans on, but because their very elusiveness gave them unusually high cachet among the designer jean community, they took the chance that they’d be a perfect fit and usually they were right and found that these underground designer jeans afforded them glories that no other jean could give them.
This isn’t to say members of the elite designer jean cult were absent of problems. They had some, to be sure. One is that once they put on a pair of jeans that they absolutely loved, they found it almost impossible to take the jeans off, even for showers, the beach, and bedtime, so that their jeans doubled as bathing suits and pajama bottoms. Also the first day they got their jeans they’d often be overcome with a sort of ambulatory mania by which they’d feel compelled to walk all over town so that the world could see them in our perfect-fit jeans. They’d strut across the mall, around the neighborhood, and into strange homes and do a pirouette until they were escorted off the premises or chased away by vicious attack dogs. They couldn’t wash these jeans because every wash faded and thus diminished them. Thus they walked around in filthy, great looking denim rags, Fabreezing them, but soon, that's wasn’t enough to curtail the stench.
I wanted to join their ranks. I wanted to wear fabulous jeans that allowed me to wear a tattered shirt with hole-ridden sneakers and still be “dressed up” and so I spent thousands of dollars on G-Stars, Lucky Brand, Diesel, and Banana Republic jeans. My attempts at becoming a cool jean wearer failed. One problem is that the fit often looked good in the store’s dressing room mirror but when I got home the pants seemed too baggy or slouched in the wrong place or simply lacked the pizzazz I saw inside the store, a phenomenon I attributed to the store’s “showroom” lighting.
And then one day while traipsing at the supermarket in my new G-Stars I discovered the root of my problem: Two skinny girls stared at my tight-fitting jeans before bursting into shrill laughter. I didn’t know what they were laughing at, but then I looked at my reflection in the dairy case and saw two bulging thighs that looked less human and more like a hippo with spray-painted jeans on my chunky quads. Then I heard the whispers, "Fatty boy can't fit in his jeans." It was time to face the facts: I was not built to wear ultra-cool jeans because my Irish and Polish ancestors were surly peasants with long trunks and chunky legs who survived draughts with their sluggish metabolism and repelled invasions by intimidating their intruders—barbarians, marauders, Huns—from their precious potato larder. I can imagine one of my ancient relatives, a burly brute, clobbering a would-be thief over the head with a huge raw potato before taking a bite out of the rock-hard vegetable, his teeth black and rotten. My family history dictates that no matter what I do I am destined to be built like a gorilla with body lines unsuitable for Speedo bikini briefs, body-hugging silk shirts, Italian leisure suits, and, yes, designer jeans. Logic dictated, then, that I should give up my taste for designer jeans and opt for baggy Jeanie pants and overalls. I am doomed to a life of frumpiness and know my place in the land of fashion losers for fat people.
The above account shows the inevitable depression and disenchantment that results from unrealistic expectations, one of the irrational faculties described in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, which focuses on four other major irrational behaviors, including __________, ____________, __________, and ______________.
Second Example of Someone with Unrealistic Expectations
Ferguson has worked out a prenuptial agreement for his ideal wife, a woman he has yet to meet. But in the case he does meet his perfect woman, he has produced a document with all the stipulations he requires for a successful marriage. First, his wife must agree to workout at the gym five days a week and stay on a low-carb diet so that he can keep a romantic interest in her over the years. Second, the ideal wife must let Ferguson go out with his buddies at least three nights a week and in doing so she is not allowed to impose a curfew on him. It is also imperative that she learn how to make local, sustainable, organic gourmet meals in order to cater to his highly sensitive allergenic digestive system. Finally, because Ferguson cannot work and is on life-long disability from chronic lower back pains, his wife must be earn a handsome income. She must not be selfish with her money either. Every six months, she must increase Ferguson's allowance by at least fifteen percent in order to adjust for increased inflation. As a man, Ferguson also wants to be allowed to have affairs because he is fond of the saying, "Variety is the spice of life." However, his wife must never cheat on him because he is still working on jealousy issues in therapy and of course his wife will have to pay for his therapy sessions.
Thus far, Ferguson has not met the ideal wife and seems fated to live, at the age of forty-five, in his grandmother's garage where he works on his blog WaitingForTheRightOne.com.
The above scenario describes a deranged and deluded gentleman who is the victim of his own unrealistic expectations, one of the major irrational behaviors chronicled in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. Other irrational behaviors include ___________, ___________, __________, and ____________.
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