Well, they are dangly bits. Dangling participles and dangling modifiers can push your readers over into a guffaw or simply ROFLTAO…ahem… At worst, not making your sentence clear can confuse the heck out of your readers. When you’re acting as your own proofreader, it can be difficult to discover these dangling confusions if only because you know in your own mind exactly what you mean to say. C.S. Lakin has done a couple of cute, short posts on dangling participles and dangling modifiers at which you should have a peek. Consider creating a checklist for yourself of difficult to remember confusions!

C.S. Lakin makes an interesting point about sequential events. I haven’t found these too often in my reading, but am very aware of them from my own writing whether it occurs from the micro-level of the sentence to the scene level in which you need your characters to get from A to B and hopefully not by passing C first!