ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by early weavers. We can respect that, because

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we hate being the last one to weave.

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

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Early weavers are depicted holding one shuttle in the right hand while placing the remaining

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left hand near the shuttles on the loom.

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This one has a bad case of a modifier-gone- wild.

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We can tell because the main difference between our four answer choices is the placement of

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the adjective "remaining."

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So we know it's our job to figure out exactly where this rogue modifier is supposed to go.

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A quick logic check helps us eliminate choice (A). The original sentence makes "remaining"

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modify "left hand."

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This would imply that the "early weavers" had more than one left hand, since the only

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way there could be a "remaining" left hand is if there was another left hand in the mix.

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Therefore we're feeling pretty good about nixing choice (A).

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Choice (D) places "remaining" before "loom." The logic doesn't check out here either. This

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would imply that these early weavers were operating more than one loom at a time.

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Choice (D) is officially eliminated.

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Choice (B) garbles the sentence so badly it's kinda hard to tell what it's trying to do.

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This would be wrong for the same reason as (A). We're positive by this point that the

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"left hand" is not the thing that's "remaining," so we can get (B) out of our hair.

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(C) gets it right by using "remaining" to modify "shuttles."

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The first half of the sentence tells us that the one shuttle is in the right hand, and

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so what is "remaining" must be the shuttles that the left hand is supposed to operate.

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Okay, now wave good-bye with all of your hands.

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