Allowing Joe to reach for me, he cradled me in his arms . Is there something wrong with this sentence? The phrase “allowing Joe to reach for me” modifies the noun that follows: he. So what this sentence says is that he (Joe) was allowing himself to cradle “me”. The fix: I allowed Joe to reach for me and he cradled me in his arms . OR: Reaching for me, Joe cradled me in his arms . The arrangement of words in a sentence is an important clue to their relationships. Modifiers will be confusing if the reader can’t connect them to the words they modify. A modifier is a phrase that describes something. They can result in sometimes unintentional humor, such as this example in the book Sin and Syntax : “FOR SALE: Mahogany table by a lady with Chippendale legs” (The lady has Chippendale legs?) Or Groucho Marx’s: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know” (He did intentionally misplace the phrase “in my pajamas” to make the joke.) In this ...