Participles Fused and Otherwise

 

If you don't know what a fused participle is, read on.

The present participle is the form of the English verb that ends in -ing:

walk walked walking

To function as a verb, the present participle must be used with an auxiliary verb:

Jack is repairing the roof.

Used without an auxiliary verb, the participle retains some shadow of its verbal origin, but functions as other parts of speech.

participle functioning as adjective:

Mr. Jones is a loving husband.

participle introducing participial phrase:

Sitting by the window, I watched the parade. (The phrase is adjectival, describing "I")

participle functioning as a noun:

The -ing participle form can also be used as a noun. In that case it gets a new name and is called a gerund.

Gerunds

Gardening is my favorite hobby. (noun, subject of "is")
He likes shooting skeet. (noun, object of "likes")
He loves to talk about hunting. (noun, object of the preposition "about")
Do you mind my asking a question? (noun, object of "mind")

NOTE on Example 4: If I had written Do you mind me asking a question, many of my readers would be quick to scold me for having written a sentence containing a fused participle.

Fused participles
The term fused participle is credited to H.W. Fowler, who hated them. Here's the definition from the OED:

fused participle - a participle regarded as being joined grammatically with a preceding noun or pronoun, rather than as a gerund that requires the possessive, or as an ordinary participle qualifying the noun.

The fused participle resides in the same category as the split infinitive: some writers abhor it and will avoid it any cost, while others recognize that, sometimes, "defusing" a fused participle is worse than leaving it alone.

My practice is to use a possessive noun or pronoun before a gerund in a sentence like the one above. If the result is ugly or nonsensical, I figure out how to rewrite the sentence without using the -ing word. Speaking is another matter. In conversation I probably fuse participles all over the place.

From: Daily Writing Tips

Proper Use of The Colon

 

The colon is a versatile punctuation mark. Here are its three primary functions, followed by a few other uses:

Definition or Expansion

“But here’s the interesting thing: He hadn’t ever been there before.”

Note the capitalization of the first word after the colon. All usage guides agree that in a sentence like “I want you to tell me one thing: the truth,” the first word should be lowercase because it begins a phrase, not a complete sentence. But handbooks are divided over whether to capitalize complete sentences.

The Chicago Manual of Style advises doing so only when the defining or expanding passage following the colon consists of two or more sentences. Others disagree, and though I usually follow Chicago, I concur with them: It can be difficult in a passage to know when the definition or expansion ends, and the distinction between a single sentence and two or more seems trivial and inconsistent.

Setting up a Quotation

He makes this moral argument: “Taking whatever we need from the world to support our comfortable lives is not worthy of us as moral beings.”

Note that the colon concludes an independent clause that introduces a statement; it brings the reader to a temporary halt. Writers, ignoring the grammatical distinction between this construction and a simple attribution, widely but incorrectly use colons in place of commas, as in this erroneous usage: “He voted against it, declaring: ‘The only thing this bill will stimulate is the national debt.’” In this case, or after “He said” or “She asked” or a similar term, a simple comma suffices.

Introducing a List

When a phrase that introduces a numbered, unnumbered, or bullet list, or a run-in list, syntactically comes to a stop, use the colon as the bumper:

“The two central questions in ethical theories are as follows:
1. What is the good for which we strive or should strive, and what is the evil that we would like to or must avoid?
2. What is the proper or desired course of action, and what is the inappropriate or forbidden course of action?”

But when each item in the list is an incomplete sentence that continues an introductory phrase, omit it:

“For this experiment, you will need electrical wire (at least 3 feet), a pair of wire cutters, a battery, a flashlight bulb, and electrical tape.”

When, in the latter example, the list is formatted with the introductory phrase and each item on its own line, “For this experiment, you will need” remains bereft of a colon, and each item ends with a period.

(Notice that my explanatory introduction to each list type above is closed, with a colon.)

Colons are used in several other ways to clarify relationships between words and numbers: They set off a character’s name from a line of dialogue in a script; separate titles and subtitles of books, films, and other works; distinguish between chapter and verse in reference to books of the Bible and in similar usages; and separate numerals denoting hours, minutes, and other units of time.

In addition, they have specific functions in mathematics, logic, and computer programming, as well as informal roles in setting actions or sounds apart from words in email and online chats (much as parentheses are used in quotations and dialogue) and as a basic character in emoticons (arrangements of punctuation marks and other symbols to simulate a facial expression).

But it is when the colon is employed in one of the three primary purposes that errors are most likely to appear and communication is most likely to be compromised.

From: Daily Writing Tips