Because of the work of Francis Christensen, sentence-terminal modification was emphasized in college composition from about 1965 to 1980. The structures emphasized included absolutes, restating and summarizing appositives, participial phrases, non-participial adjective phrases, adjectival clauses and prepositional phrases, and adverbial clauses and phrases. This emphasis, however, had little effect on technical writing, in spite of the practical utility of terminal modifiers. This article, therefore, explains the terminal modifiers and exemplifies them in the context of technical writing; it then examines the texts of representative technical reports to determine the extent to which terminal modifiers are currently used. The findings—generally that the report writers do not take full advantage of terminal modification—indicate that increased attention to terminal modifiers, especially the absolute, the summarizing appositive, and the non-participial adjective phrase, would significantly increase the options for effective expression by technical writers.

students. In 1966 Orin Seright, in On Defining the Appositive, contrasts the appositive with the adjectival, using this example of the adjective clause: My sister, whom we elected president, is here (108). Seright calls the italicized clause a non-restrictive although it is a modifier of sister rather than the main clause. (Seright points out that appositives, often presented as if they were always nominals, not only restate previous structures but also may substitute for them [109]; thus, verbs, adverbials, and adjectivals as well as nominals may function as appositives.) Seright's belief that the adjective clause is a modifier may follow directly from what I regard as an oversight by Seright's colleague Francis Christensen. In the 1968 article entitled The Problem of Defining a Mature Style, Christensen objects to the term modifiers--only because the constructions one another as well as sentences (143). He overlooks the possibility that many of these sentence actually modify a particular word in the (usually) preceding word-group. Indeed, calling them modifiers, in contrast to modifiers,' he explains that bound modifiers word They close or limiting or restrictive modifiers. But free modifiers are modifiers not of words but of constructions, from which they set off by junctures or punctuation. Grammatically, they loose or additive or nonessential or nonrestrictive (143). Free modifiers, Christensen seems to say, always modify the preceding main clause or free modifier, and concomitantly free modifiers do not modify a particular word in the preceding unit. But as I view these modifiers, they indeed seem to be loose; and they clearly additive, nonessential, and nonrestrictive. However, many of them do not modify consrucions but single words.

(1987). The triangle and the stance: Toward a rhetoric for novice writers. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 263-279.