ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Aunt Sue. She's got a thing for litigation.

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How should you change the underlined portion below, if at all?

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Sweeping up the paper from the floor, the missing key was found by Aunt Sue.

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If we've recently reminded ourselves of the rule about modifying phrases, we can answer

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this question without breaking a mental sweat.

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The noun or pronoun that's being modified has to come directly after the modifying phrase, right?

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So, all we have to do is ask ourselves who or what the phrase is describing and plop

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that noun or pronoun where it's supposed to be.

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In this question, "sweeping up the paper from the floor" is the phrase. So, if choice (A)

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is correct, then it's the missing key that's making the floor spic-and-span.

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It doesn't make much sense for a key to sweep a floor to find itself, or for a key to do

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any sweeping at all for that matter. Therefore we can confidently move on to other options.

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We can easily eliminate choice (B) as well, since it makes the same error as (A).

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Though it might not look like it at first glance, choice (C) actually makes the same

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mistake as (A) and (B).

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The first noun that follows our modifying phrase is again "key." "Aunt Sue" might be

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a noun on its own, but here the apostrophes makes it possessive, and therefore it functions

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as a modifier.

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By describing whose key this is, the noun becomes an adjective.

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Choice (D) correctly places Aunt Sue in her place of glory directly after the modifying

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phrase.

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This version makes it clear that Aunt Sue was the one doing the sweeping that then helped

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her find the missing key.

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For the record, if anybody has a magic key that wants to sweep some floors, we're interested.

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