Right or wrong?

[pluckyduck]

Strolling by her desk on her first day, I was utterly dumbfounded to find my very first slow hire struggling with her calculator as if she had never seen one before.

Did I misplace the thingamabobs in this sentence? I'm so discombulated I can't even tell.

Andrea
who yes, is a back to a nervous, neurotic Nellie....one Epinion in 6 months

[pluckyduck]

I already figured out this one was messed up.....

One girl stumbled in the day after she graduated from college to answer phones for a single afternoon, and I never let her go.

.... I'm off to fix it.

Why, oh, why do you see these things afterwards.

Andrea
who can't remember now if it is "afterward" or "afterwards"...sigh, and Bridgette has worked so hard

[proeditor]

my second reply to you in one day!

I think your sentence is probably OK grammar wise, and sounds fine on second reading. But on first reading, it's a bit difficult because it's a bit long, and the "strolling by" sounds like it might have been done by her instead of you. How about:

"When I strolled by my new hire's desk on her first day, I was utterly dumbfounded to find her struggling with her calculator as if she had never seen one before. My very first hiring mistake!"

I know that technically my second sentence isn't a sentence, but I think that's OK in creative writing. I find confusing sentences almost always benefit from breaking them into two.

Just my 2 cents.

[pluckyduck]

Karen, thanks....that's pretty much what I was thinking. I tried to pull it apart, and it seemed as if the grammar was okay, but it still wasn't sitting right with me.

One of my biggest writing sins is misplacing my thingamabobs.

All right, adding that to my list of edits.


Andrea
afterward? or afterwards??? Bridgette!!!

[proeditor]

gotta watch those thingamabobs - they'll getcha every time!

Actually, I can never remember the technical terms for parts of sentences, so when I look it up in a grammar book, I need someone to translate for me. English class was just too long ago . . .

I think it's "afterward".

Karen

[infoscott]

Actually, all your thingamabobs were all in order. The two key elements were the adjectival phrase that began the sentence (began with the participle "strolling" and properly referred to "I"), and the pronoun "her" in the phrase that properly referred to the slow hire "she".

What crossed my eyes initially was having reference from the phrase to the sentence and another back again from the sentence to the phrase. I think you found the grammatical equivalent to an optical illusion, though we never studied such sentences in advanced syntax class (I was a linguistics major). If you want to learn a ten dollar word; in linguistics the study of such pronoun reference is called anaphora .

-Scott