| I've been grammar sniped! [0] > Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs, this has been a long journey and many things helped us get to this point. This sentence has a very common grammatical error called a dangling modifier. In this case, notice that the adjective (i.e. noun-modifier) "Confident" is intended to modify the pronoun "us." But, if we look at the sentence, the subject of the sentence is the pronoun "this"! Because introductory phrases (from Confident... to the first comma) are naturally attached to the subject of the sentence, it sounds like the target of "this", namely "the long journey", is the target of the modifier. Generally you can catch these by reading your work aloud. Once you read, "Confident that [...], this was a long journey...", hopefully it will throw some red flags that this sentence "doesn't make sense." Another technique (of error location) is shortening the sentence to make the error more pronounced: Confident that we're awesome, this journey has taken us far. Potential rewordings (of many): It has been a long journey and many things helped us get to a point where we are confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs. Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs, we're reaching a milestone in our long journey. If we also try to introduce some brevity: After a long journey, we're confident that our product is fast and accurate enough for real-world QA. [0]: http://xkcd.com/356/ Edited to add: this is meant to be helpful to the poster, who also wrote the post (I assume). It's not a commentary on their product, since as I said, I never did get past the first paragraph. |
I would think blog writers would like to see tips on how to write well.
I'd be interested to see if the author of the original post revises his entry.