Prepositional phrases can be tricky! They can easily become misplaced modifiers, throwing a money wrench in your sentence’s meaning.

Let’s fix these sentences

Why would she share the secret he’d confided in her in the hall with her parents?
We’re really confused here. It’s unclear that we’re talking about two different conversations here. The way it’s written, it sounds like “she” is sharing a secret that he’d confided in her with her parents, in a conversation that took place in the hall.

Probably not what we’re going for.

Instead, we need to shuffle these prepositional phrases or even drop some of them:

• Why would she share with her parents the secret he’d confided in her in the hall?
• Why would she share the secret he’d confided in her with her parents? (Though this may not fully fix the problem, it’s a bit less ambiguous.)
• Why would she share his secret with her parents? (Shortest, simplest and probably best.)

He remembered the dog he’d found as he was walking in the apartment in the street.
Again, the meaning is all over the place here. Did he find the dog in the street? In the apartment? Or is the apartment in the street? Did he find the dog while walking, or remember it while walking?

Try again for clarity.

• As he walked into the apartment, he remembered the dog he’d found in the street.
• As he walked in the street, he remembered the dog he’d found in the apartment.
• He remembered that dog—he’d found it as he was walking in his apartment.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
This one is a famous joke, with the punchline “How he got into my pajamas, I shall never know.”

For humorous purposes, this works—but you have to call attention to a somewhat minor ambiguity, as in the scene I shared last time from Clue:

A man was bitten by a bat walking down the street on his thumb.
The bat here is the one walking down the street . . . on his thumb.

This cuts to the heart of the issue: make sure the prepositional phrase is closest to whatever it’s modifying.

“On his thumb” describes where he was bitten, so it should go by that. He was walking down the street when he was bitten.

• A man walking down the street was bitten on his thumb by a bat.
• A man was walking down the street when a bat bit him on the thumb.
• A bat bit a man on his thumb as he was walking down the street.

She couldn’t believe he was standing there after their conversation yesterday on the sidewalk.
If the conversation took place on the sidewalk, this might be a little clearer with “yesterday” at the end. Otherwise, we need to move “on the sidewalk” closer to “he was standing there” to show it modifies that phrase, not the sentence.

• She couldn’t believe he was standing there after their conversation on the sidewalk yesterday. (Conversation on sidewalk.)
• She couldn’t believe he was standing there on the sidewalk after their conversation yesterday. (Standing on sidewalk now.)

Again, often the problem is using multiple modifiers or more than one prepositional phrase. As we stack the phrases, we have to be sure the meaning doesn’t get lost, or we’ll leave our readers confused!

So how would you fix these sentences? Any good ones you’ve seen?

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