REALLY AWFUL GERUNDS AND PARTICIPLES – AMAZING AND CONFUSING

A funny ting happening …
(No, I am not going to give up my day job in favour of cartooning!)

An ‘ING’ is quite a funny th-ING.
It can to words completion br-ING,
Or turn a verb into a noun
If you a gerund should jot down,
So ‘walkING is a healthy sport’
Describes an ‘ing’-form of this sort. 

Alas! The present participle
Is what drives a man to tipple,
An adjectival form is this:
‘The walkING boy blew me a kiss’,
But if up front you place that kind,
A subject trap you may well find! 

‘WalkING up the street one day,
A kiss was blown to me,’ you say?
At that, though, I must promptly baulk,
For kisses surely cannot walk,
And, if with subject you dispense,
That sentence won’t make any sense.

I have previously posted on this subject, but I continue to see experienced writers wriggling helplessly in convoluted clauses.  Starting a sentence with a gerund does add variety to writing, but it creates a trap which so many constantly fall into.

 Think you understand it? Let me really tie your brain into knots:

BEING cannot be heavy, BEING described as the incredible lightness of being.

BEING (gerund – BEING as a thing which is not heavy)

cannot be heavy,

BEING (participle – BEING tells what BEING does)

described as the incredible lightness of

being. (gerund – being as a thing which has lightness)

So:

BEING described as the incredible lightness of being, BEING cannot be heavy.

But:

BEING, described as the incredible lightness of being, cannot be heavy. (here the participle BEING as an action has been eliminated and only BEING and being, as things, remain) 

RUNNING is healthy, as everyone knows;
But if done by a nose, then ill-health it shows! (Gerund) 

RUNNING for office, George neglected running the office. (Participles)
 

Having responsibility for security, it is up to John to have the alarm fixed.

Considering the circumstances, the outcome was pretty good.

(Do these sentences seem right?  Actually, the first has a misplaced subject for ‘having’, while the second has no subject whatsoever for ‘considering’. However, these forms have become so common that the mind does pick out ‘John’ as the subject in the first, and translates the second as: When one considers the circumstances the outcome was pretty good.) 

Right:

BEING correctly placed in a sentence starting with an ‘…ing’ word,  THE SUBJECT of that word would be seen appearing directly after the comma.

(What is being placed?  THE SUBJECT  is what is being placed.)

 Wrong:

BEING correctly placed in a sentence starting with an ‘…ing’ word, ONE would see the subject appearing directly after the comma. 

(ONE is not being placed.)

What further confuses most people is putting another clause in between:

Right:

BEING correctly placed in a sentence starting with an ‘…ing’ word, with proper grammar, THE SUBJECT of that word would be seen appearing directly after the second comma. 

Wrong:

BEING correctly placed in a sentence starting with an ‘…ing’ word, with proper grammar, ONE would see the subject appearing directly after the second comma. 

Wrong:

BEING obscured by the clause in the middle, and far away from the first word, IT is going to be difficult to find the subject of that word.

(Here, ‘it’ has become the subject, which it is not – but is the subject of ‘going’.) 

Right:

THE SUBJECT of a word ending in ‘…ing’ causes confusion.  BEING correctly placed in a sentence, and so as not to make the sentence senseless, IT should be placed directly after the second comma.

(Because of the new  sentence in front, IT has become correct, because IT now refers to THE SUBJECT in that first sentence.) 

Now, ice-packs applied to the brain are recommended. 

© Colonialist March 2013 (WordPress)