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The hung participle can confuse the reader - it is best avoided

Long ago, when writing a column called Smallweed, I complained that someone had written: "Entering the auditorium, the roof fell on his head." What an incompetent sentence, I raged, as if a roof could have entered an auditorium! Here, I smugly asserted, was that ancient grammatical curse we'd been warned against at school: the hung, or as people more often say nowadays, dangling participle. A reader from Dorset wrote back to tell me not to be so pedantic. It was perfectly clear from the sense, he said, who had entered the auditorium: not the roof, but the man who'd soon after been hit on the head. "Get a life" I suspect, had not yet entered the language, but that was what I was being invited to do.

I wish I'd collected all the samples of participles hung and dangled in front of my eyes over more than a decade since then. There was one, I remember, that began, more or less, "Born in 1950, his mother died when he was 12": it wasn't till further into the paragraph that I realised it wasn't his mother who'd been born in 1950, but the man I was reading about. But I've picked up one or two intriguing examples in newspapers over the past few weeks which again raise the question: do such things matter? Two come from sports writers, though I sense those who practise this trade are no more to blame than other practitioners. First dangler, from the Guardian: "There were some late pyrotechnics when Andrew Flintoff was left with the tail, but after hitting Makhaya Ntini for six and then four, Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar then contrived to get run out from successive deliveries." This sentence, a reader complained, had made out that Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar had by some unusual feat of collusion hit Ntini for a six and a four; and in fact of course both these powerful blows were struck by Freddie. Dangler number two, from the Times, discussing the appointment to the England captaincy of Kevin Pietersen: "walking across Lord's with him at the end of his first press conference, he was honest enough to admit that he didn't know whether or how it would affect his game." Strictly speaking, the man who walked across Lord's with Pietersen would have been the subject of the sentence that followed - that is, Pietersen himself. It took only a second or two to deduce that the captain's companion was the man from the Times.

It's that second or two, however, that may be significant. I don't take the intractable line of an old English master who held that those who employed hung participles deserved to be hung (or rather, as he would have pointed out pretty fiercely, hanged). I also discovered, on turning as one always ought to do in these matters to Fowler's Modern English Usage - presided over nowadays by RW Burchfield - that criticism, or, as he adds, ridicule, of unattached participles only began around a century ago. Shakespeare used to hang or dangle them: "Tis given that, sleeping in mine orchard, a serpent stung me." When not so long ago the Conservative peer Lord Belstead said in a tribute to Lord Whitelaw: "being unique, I am not going in any way to imitate him", few would have assumed that Belstead was here saluting his own uniqueness. Nor could there have been much of a mystery when Radio 4's The World at One announced that "after inspecting a guard of honour, President Reagan's motorcade moved to the centre of Moscow"; most people know that even US presidents prefer to inspect guards of honour themselves, rather than leaving the job to a motorcade. But when, as I guess may have happened with Anderson, Panesar and the boundaries, or with the Times's conversation at Lord's, there's a flicker of doubt as to who's doing what with whom, participles are better unhung and undangled. It's the reader's ease and convenience that counts.

The ripest example I found, again in Burchfield's Fowler, concerned Iraq. Guess who said: "Yesterday, after conferring with my senior national security advisers, and following extensive consultation with our coalition partners, Saddam Hussein was given one last chance"? No, it wasn't him. This was 1991: it was his father.

· Siobhain Butterworth is away