<p>Can someone please tell me how to use participial phrases correctly? I’ve been stuck on one of today’s SAT writing questions and cannot seem to figure out how the participial phrase works.</p>
<p>In the novel Salt, the author blends blah with blah based off some culture’s mythology, producing an evocative book.</p>
<p>Is the participial phrase being used correctly in this sentence? If it is, shouldn’t these sentences also make sense?</p>
<p>In the novel Salt, the author producing an evocative book blends blah with blah based off some culture’s mythology.
OR
In the novel Salt, the author who produces an evocative book blends blah with blah based off some culture’s mythology.</p>
<p>Shouldn’t participial phrases make sense if they are written in this form?</p>
<p>Hopefully someone who’s taken the test can recall all the choices.</p>
<p>The two sentences at the end of your post are both poor English.</p>
<p>In the first the phrase “the author producing an evocative book” is unclear. Is the intent for "producing … " to serve as a verb? That’s incorrect usage. But then where’s the verb? Perhaps something like:</p>
<p>… the author produces an evocative book by blending …</p>
<p>In the second the phrase “who produces an evocative” is unclear. Is it meant to identify the author as someone “who produces an evocative book”. Is that book Salt? Anyway, it’s not good English.</p>
<p>So is the original acceptable? I would think that “to produce” would a better choice than “producing”. Was that an option?</p>
<p>The question was actually a find the error question.</p>
<p>In the novel Salt, the author blends blah with blah based off some culture’s mythology, producing an evocative book.</p>
<p>The sentence was definitely something along these lines. I chose that the error was the “producing”, but practically everyone on the forums got this question as a (E)No error. Yeah, I know that the last two sentences are poor English. I was trying to show that if it the “producing an evocative book” was actually a participial phrase as used in the sentence, then the two sentences I created should have grammatically made sense.</p>