Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Maybe my natural feeling for language is just better than that of many people, or something, as I really cannot fathom how a native English speaker (writer) could make such a mistake.
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Because we tend to speak in sentence fragments, not grammatically complete sentences, and dangling participles are essentially a written form of the type of "shortcut" that people use in the spoken language. (Eg if someone asks you what you're doing, you might reply "reading a book", rather than "I'm reading a book".) It's perfectly understandable, even if grammatically wrong. The reason it's grammatically wrong, of course, is that the participle clause has no verb, but the verb is clearly implied - eg "Hiking the trail" is really "While I was hiking the trail". But it really shouldn't be used in written English.