lllustrated grammar!

Today, we used this website to look at some grammatical errors, and to talk about how to fix them. One of the sentences from that site was this one:

Underestimating its value, breakfast is a meal many people skip.

We talked about how this sentence includes a misplaced modifier--though we jump to an assumption that it's the people who underestimate the value of breakfast, the sentence actually provides us an image of breakfast cereal having a sad, existential crisis. We fixed the sentence to clarify that it's the people who underestimate the value of breakfast, not the breakfast itself. I pointed out that one of the best ways to find misplaced modifiers is to create a picture, mental or literal--misplaced modifiers often create hilarious images.

Then, Amanda became our grammatical cartoonist...here's what she created to illustrate the point: