Study materials
This sentence has been in textbooks for a hundred years, and not by accident.
She saw the man with the telescope.
No rule has been broken. The ambiguity comes not from an error but from the fact that English grammar does not mark what a final phrase belongs to.
Attachment: what the phrase belongs to
The commonest type of ambiguity. A prepositional phrase or a participle at the end of a sentence can belong to two different words, and grammar does not show which.
She saw the man with the telescope.
We discussed the report on the plane.
The reader attaches the phrase to the nearest suitable word. If you meant the farther one, they will never know.
Three ways of removing ambiguity
There are not many, and they line up by cost: from the cheapest to the most reliable.
| Method | When it works |
|---|---|
| rearrange the parts | there are few candidates for attachment |
| set it off with commas | the part really is additional |
| repeat the word or the article | the question is one of scope |
| split into two sentences | nothing else works |
the experienced engineers and the technicians
Not all the students passed.
Where it breaks down
The first failure: a participle has attached to the nearest noun.
She showed me a photo of her sister taken in Rome.
The second: a prepositional phrase has two owners.
We discussed the report on the plane.
The third: the author rereads their own text already knowing the answer.
The manager told the client he was wrong.
All three are caught by one test. Read the final phrase together with each noun on its left in turn. If the second reading also makes sense, the sentence is ambiguous.
Try it right now
Take three long sentences from your own writing and try to read each in two ways.
Where you managed it, rearrange the parts so that only one reading survives.