Monday, July 02, 2007

Misplaced Modifier Alert

This isn't the worst we've seen, but it's still pretty grisly for a daily newspaper:

A Boy Scout troop found the body of man missing since April while on a weekend canoe trip on the Shookumchuck River near Centralia, police in the southwest Washington town said.


Who was on the float trip? The Boy Scout troop? Or the dead man? If it was the latter, we'd say that was probably the trip of a lifetime... except for that part about being dead.

It would have been better to write the sentence this way:

A Boy Scout troop on a weekend canoe trip found the body of man missing since April in the Shookumchuck River near Centralia, police in the southwest Washington town said.

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