A friend wrote on Facebook yesterday about her dismay on finding a dangling modifier in The New Yorker. It was in the David Sedaris story I wrote about a few weeks ago: “While walking on that first afternoon, a man stopped his truck, introduced himself as Rocky, and asked me what my favorite color was.”
I messaged my friend that I had heard Sedaris read that story, and that he had prefaced it by talking about the magazine’s rigorous fact checker and, at the conclusion, had spoken about his run-ins with the sensitivity reader. Perhaps, I said, they should invest in a line editor with a knowledge of grammar.
