I wanted to acknowledge how important it is to understand the concept of modifiers to actually read well. For example, any complex text or anything worth reading uses of a lot of modifiers. Formal things like papers and textbooks tend to have the use of modifiers.
But a lot of times they come in the form of “word, modifier.”
"The treaty, negotiated over fourteen months across four rotating host cities by delegations representing competing imperial and post-colonial interests, collapsed."And those who are not very familiar with it come to think of both word and the modifier phrase as two distinct things. Instead of it being one concept and the other describing that concept more, it turns in their head into something that means two concepts.
Which is, of course, not what the author intended.
Another pattern is where you have “word, modifier, continuation of the previous sentence”
"The bill was passed, despite widespread opposition from industry lobbyists, or quietly shelved before the vote."So now, instead of it being one thing, its description and second thing, it turns into a weird mess where one might interpret it as three things or whatever.
Another version is where the sentence makes itself complicated by housing modifiers without giving any grammatical clues.
"The stock that crashed the market recovered within a week."Thus, knowing modifiers and knowing when to ignore them can help you a lot. If a sentence is already complex enough for you, you can turn your eyes blind to the modifier and look at the raw sentence first and then go for the descriptors.
Example:
“The treaty, negotiated over fourteen months across four rotating host cities by delegations representing competing imperial and post-colonial interests, collapsed.”
“The bill was passed, despite widespread opposition from industry lobbyists, or quietly shelved before the vote.”
“Quantum entanglement, a phenomenon Einstein famously called ‘spooky action at a distance,’ challenges our classical intuitions about locality and causality.”
“The stock that crashed the market recovered within a week.”
Now that you understand the basic sentence, you can go for the modifiers if they were too complicated to deal with all at once.