Poster Sentences: Combining, Dangling, Run-on
The science club is preparing a poster for the city science fair. The draft contains three short sentences that the student wants to combine: 'The experiment was repeated three times. The results were almost identical. This suggests the method is reliable.' The poster also contains two other problem sentences. The first is: 'Walking into the laboratory, the new equipment surprised the students.' The second is: 'The club will present its findings at the city science fair it has been preparing the poster for two weeks.' The teacher wants one combined sentence that keeps 'reliable' as the main claim, a corrected modifier sentence, and a corrected run-on. She has told the student that punctuation alone is not enough: the combined sentence must show the logical link between repeating the experiment and trusting the method.
1. Combine the three sentences into one sentence in which 'reliable' remains the main claim. Explain the logical link you made explicit.
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One good version: 'Because the experiment was repeated three times with almost identical results, the method appears reliable.' The link is inference from replication: repeated trials produced the same outcome, and that consistency is the reason for trusting the method.
Making the link explicit means turning one sentence into a subordinate clause with 'because' or 'since', and demoting the results to a phrase ('with almost identical results'). Keeping 'reliable' as the main claim means it must sit in the main clause, not in a subordinate one; a version such as 'The method was repeated three times, which suggests reliability' buries the point.
Avoid the original 'This suggests', because 'this' has no clear noun to refer to and the reader must reconstruct what suggests what. On a poster, where readers scan rather than read, that ambiguity costs more than it would in an essay.
2. Correct 'Walking into the laboratory, the new equipment surprised the students' and explain the error.
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Corrected: 'When the students walked into the laboratory, the new equipment surprised them.' The original is a dangling, or misrelated, participle. An introductory participial phrase is understood to describe the subject of the main clause, which here is 'the new equipment' - so the sentence literally says the equipment walked into the laboratory.
The fix is to make the actor the subject. Either 'Walking into the laboratory, the students were surprised by the new equipment' (the students are now the subject, and the participle has a subject that can walk) or the 'When ...' version above. The first is closer to the original and keeps the surprise as the main event.
The test is mechanical: find the subject after the comma and ask whether it can perform the action in the -ing phrase. If it cannot, the modifier is dangling, whatever the sentence means to say.
3. Correct the run-on 'The club will present its findings at the city science fair it has been preparing the poster for two weeks.' Give two acceptable versions and explain the choice.
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The string contains two independent clauses with no boundary: the club will present ..., and it has been preparing ... Two repairs are available.
(a) Semicolon or full stop: 'The club will present its findings at the city science fair; it has been preparing the poster for two weeks.'
(b) Subordinate one clause and name the relation: 'The club will present its findings at the city science fair, for which it has been preparing the poster for two weeks' or 'Because it has been preparing the poster for two weeks, the club will present ...'
A comma alone would be a comma splice, which is an error, not a style choice. The version to prefer on a poster is (a), because it is short and the causal link is obvious; the 'for which' version is more precise but heavier. Whatever the repair, the two ideas must remain distinguishable.