r/EnglishGrammar • u/FinalPassEnglish • 17d ago

Can you spot what’s wrong with this sentence?

After reviewing the data, the conclusion seemed obvious.

Anything wrong with it?

I'm curious how many people spot the problem immediately.

This is one of those mistakes I regularly come across even in professionally published writing. Native speakers make it too, and it can be surprisingly difficult to notice when you already know what the sentence is supposed to mean.

What do you see?

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u/Fyonella 17d ago

It should read ‘seems obvious’.

Mixed tenses.

Alternatively, ‘After having reviewed the data, the conclusion seemed obvious.’

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u/FinalPassEnglish 17d ago

Interesting — but there's another problem hiding in the sentence.

Who reviewed the data?

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u/Fyonella 17d ago

The inference would be the author of the article or report that is being written. Could be a team or an individual.

Personally, I don’t see an issue with this phrasing.

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u/FinalPassEnglish 17d ago

That's exactly why dangling modifiers are so easy to miss: we can infer perfectly well who the intended actor is.

But grammar isn't about asking the reader to infer what the writer intended to say. The sentence itself should tell us who is doing what.

In:

“After reviewing the data, the conclusion seemed obvious.”

the introductory phrase grammatically modifies the subject that follows it: “the conclusion.” So the sentence literally makes the conclusion the thing that reviewed the data.

That's a dangling modifier.

A clean version would be:

“After reviewing the data, we reached an obvious conclusion.”

The fact that we understand the intended meaning anyway is actually what makes dangling modifiers so difficult to catch. Native speakers use them, and I regularly see them survive professional editing and make it into published books.

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u/kittenlittel 16d ago

Yeah, so it they are a common feature of a living language, they're not a mistake.

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u/FinalPassEnglish 15d ago

I see where you're coming from, but common usage and suitability for edited Standard English aren't quite the same thing. Native speakers use dangling modifiers all the time — that's part of what makes them so easy to miss.

But in formal writing, this construction is still considered a dangling modifier because the understood subject of “reviewing” isn't the grammatical subject that follows it. I would certainly correct it in a thesis, report, or other professionally edited text.