Get Your Affairs in Order!

The rule of thumb in writing is that you should put modifiers as close as possible to what they modify. If you don’t, you end up with a sentence that your readers have to figure out. Here’s an example:

The project tells the story of how water shapes the planet using aerial photography to deliver a series of stunning images that sit on the border between abstract art and documentary realism.

https://newatlas.com/water-shapes-earth-milan-radisics-aerial-photography/58023/

Wait! The water uses aerial photography??? That’s what the sentence says. You get a little jolt reading the sentence, don’t you? Here’s what the writer actually means:

The project uses aerial photography to tell the story of how water shapes the planet, delivering a series of stunning images that sit on the border between abstract art and documentary realism.

Both sentences are grammatical, but now the flow is better. A serious intellectual problem to decipher the sentence? No. Most anyone should be able to figure out what the writer means. But here’s the rule:

Bad writing must never be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.

PS—Here’s one of the pictures: