Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

The staff at the ABC health clinic take care of people who are sick,
like local doctors.
Between changing nappies, I wondered if you would consider writing
a note to open the new issue of our baby directory.
In this last example, the magazine editor means to ask the celebrity
she writes to—who is both a supermodel and a mother—if she
could write something between nappies; the editor implies that the
thought occurred to her—which may well be true, if I know
anything about that editor—between changing her own child’s
nappies.
TRY THIS
1 Rework my quoll sentence and the two further examples
above to avoid ambiguity.
2 ‘I saw an elephant, standing on my toes’ is another classic
of this kind; so too ‘I saw a car with three wheels over the
balcony’. Here’s another I just read: ‘We offer suggestions
for reducing the high rates of injuries in this report’. See if
you can fix those.
3 I heard this on the radio the other day. See if you can fix
what’s loose about it: ‘To celebrate his two hundred-andfiftieth
birthday, ABC-FM has decided to play all of
Beethoven’s concertos’. (If I write the pronoun ‘his’, my
readers will expect the next proper noun to be the one ‘his’
stands in for, namely ‘Beethoven’.Try starting the sentence
with the main clause or swapping ‘Beethoven’s’ and ‘his’.)
Lore 21