Tutoring a Scholarship Essay With a Comma Splice and a Dangling Modifier
A writing-center tutor is helping a student revise a 600-word scholarship essay. The paragraph under review begins: 'The internship changed my career goals, I now want to study public health. Having grown up in a neighborhood with one clinic, the staff's dedication impressed me. I volunteered for six months; I learned to schedule patients and to explain insurance forms; and I also learned how to listen. My supervisor, who had worked there for ten years, she encouraged me to apply for the scholarship.' The student has three days before the deadline and wants to preserve a conversational tone while correcting errors. The scholarship rubric rewards clarity, sentence variety, and grammatical control; it does not penalize a few simple sentences. The tutor must decide which issues to address in one 30-minute session.
1. Identify the comma splice in the first two sentences and write two revisions: one that keeps two sentences, one that uses a different punctuation mark correctly. Explain how each changes rhythm.
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The comma splice is The internship changed my career goals, I now want to study public health. Two independent clauses are joined by only a comma. Revision A uses a period: The internship changed my career goals. I now want to study public health. This creates two short, emphatic sentences and gives the career change a dramatic pause, but it slightly separates the cause-and-effect link. Revision B uses a semicolon: The internship changed my career goals; I now want to study public health. The semicolon keeps the two ideas in one sentence and signals that the second clause closely explains the first. A third option, The internship changed my career goals, so I now want to study public health, makes the causal link explicit but adds a word. For a conversational essay that values clarity and some sentence variety, the semicolon version is likely the best fit.
2. The second sentence 'Having grown up in a neighborhood with one clinic, the staff's dedication impressed me' is dangling. Revise it so the modifier clearly attaches to a person, and explain why the original is illogical.
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The introductory participial phrase Having grown up in a neighborhood with one clinic should describe the person who grew up. In the original, the nearest subject is the staff's dedication, which produces the absurd reading that the dedication grew up in the neighborhood. Revise to Having grown up in a neighborhood with one clinic, I was impressed by the staff's dedication. Now the implied subject of having grown up is I, and the main clause also has I as its subject.
An alternative is Because I grew up in a neighborhood with one clinic, the staff's dedication impressed me. This turns the modifier into a dependent clause and makes the causal relationship explicit. The participial revision is more concise and preserves the student's reflective tone; the because-clause is clearer if the reader needs the logic spelled out.
3. The final sentence has both a relative clause and a resumptive pronoun ('she'). Revise and explain whether the commas around 'who had worked there for ten years' are appropriate.
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Revise to My supervisor, who had worked there for ten years, encouraged me to apply for the scholarship. The pronoun she is a resumptive pronoun: it repeats the subject my supervisor after the relative clause, producing a double subject. Removing it restores a single grammatical subject, My supervisor, with encouraged as the main verb.
The commas are appropriate because the relative clause is nonrestrictive: my supervisor already identifies a specific person, and who had worked there for ten years adds background rather than defining which supervisor. If the writer had two supervisors and needed to distinguish one, the clause would be restrictive and would take no commas: My supervisor who had worked there for ten years encouraged me... In this context, the nonrestrictive reading is clearly intended.