in modifier chapter , "ensuring clarity in modifier introduced by which"

"The police found the murder weapon, which made the prosecutor's job much easier." is wrong as it "which" modifies noun "weapon".

Corrected sentence is mentioned as :
"The police found the murder weapon, making the prosecutor's job much easier." But again modifying phrase "making ..." is modifying the noun "weapon".


thanks,
abhay

Read that section again and you'll see that "making the prosecutor's job much easier" is an adverbial modifier that modifies the entire clause "the police found the murder weapon." It's the entire fact that the weapon was found that makes the prosecutor's job easier, not the weapon itself.

My real confusion is with participle phrases used as adjective phrase or adverbial phrase.

In the following sentence the participle phrase is adverbial phrase :
The police found the murder weapon, making the prosecutor's job much easier
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- The underlined phrase modifies preceding clause

Is the participle phrase in the following sentence an adverbial phrase or is it modifying "the boy" ?
Giving her the message, the boy felt a weight lift from his shoulders
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What is the rule of thumb ?

Also adding the following OC question to the discussion makes my understanding much more murkier.

Based on accounts of various ancient writers, scholars have painted a sketchy picture of the activities....
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The explanation says it is wrong ? I don;t see how it is wrong ?

Can some one please help me ? I have re-read the guide and lots of material on net. The more I read, the more I am confused.

When you have an -ing form participle at the beginning of a modifying phrase, then it modifies the preceding or subsequent clause (depending on the sentence).

So in the sentence about the boy, "giving her the message" modifies the subsequent clause. Think about what's being conveyed. Are we just trying to say "the boy gave her a message"? Or are we trying to say that the act of giving her the message caused something else to happen? It's the latter - the boy felt a weight lift from his shoulders.

In your OG example, the word (based) now has an -ed ending, not an -ing ending. This is now a noun modifier, and the first noun after the comma is scholars. So it basically says the scholars themselves are "based on accounts of various ancient writers." That's not what we want to say; we want to say the scholars used the accounts of various ancient writers to do something else. So we change to an -ing form (using) so that we can correctly modify the clause: scholars have painted X using accounts of Y.

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT

Hi Ron/Stacy,

If the choice (B) now is
"Basing on accounts of various ancient writers,"
or
"Basing on various ancient writers' accounts,"

Can we choose these answer?
If yes, which one is better?
If No, please indicate.

Thanks for your help

i would caution you against ever asking "what if" questions about changing parts of verbal questions, because there are often several interconnected parts that cannot be fully accounted for by a single change. just focus on why the right answer is right and why all the wrong answers are wrong..

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Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor