ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by participles. Hey, it's your participle,

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you can cry if you want to.

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How should you change the highlighted portion below, if at all?

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Coach Dietz exemplified unprofessional behavior by walking off the field in the middle of

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a game. Leaving her team at a time when we needed her.?

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Verbals are derived from verbs, but they serve different functions from their original verb

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form.

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Here, "leaving" is based on the verb "leave," but the "ing" ending and its function in the

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sentence magically transform it into a type of verbal known as a participle.

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"Leaving" introduces the participle phrase, "Leaving her team at a time when we needed

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her."

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Participles and participle phrases always function as adjectives, which means that they

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have to be attached to a noun or pronoun that they modify in some way.

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The participle phrase in question here is describing, or modifying, Coach Dietz, who

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either just can't take the heat, or has a serious lack of team spirit.

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However, it's well nigh impossible for a participle phrase to do its job of modifying something,

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when there's a period getting in its way.

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In order for it to describe Coach Dietz, it needs some kind of punctuation to keep it

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attached to the previous sentence.

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Therefore, we know that choice (A) is incorrect.

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The period that's keeping our phrase apart from the word it's trying to modify actually

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turns it into a fragment.

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What can we say? Participle phrases just aren't good with being alone...

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Choice (C) does try to bridge the gap by using a bit of punctuation.

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Unfortunately, semicolons are used to connect two independent clauses.

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Since our modifying participle phrase is totally dependent in the first sentence, we can say

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sayonara to choice (C).

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Choice (D) tries to connect the two sentences with a colon, but this doesn't work either.

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Colons can only be used to connect an independent clause to something else, like a list or another

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independent clause.

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The trouble here is that "Coach Dietz exemplified unprofessional behavior by walking off the

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field in the middle of," is not an independent clause.

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It just sounds weird, right? Putting the colon there breaks up the prepositional phrase "of

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the game" in a way that just isn't natural.

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We can definitely take (D) out of the running.

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Choice (B) wins the day by correctly using a comma to connect the participle phrase to

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the first sentence.

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Now our modifying phrase can describe Coach Dietz's bad behavior without anything standing

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its way...although we're guessing that Dietz would rather the phrase keep its modifying

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to itself...

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