When one action leads to or is the reason for another

Present participle clauses

Poor Rob! Did you get the answer as to why he went back to his flat?

He went back to his flat to clean himself up after cutting his head tripping down the stairs.

There were lots of examples of the present participle (verb + ing) in that piece by Rob. Some of them were used in past continuous verb forms. For example:

...where I was going ... ,  I was planning to ...

There were quite a few other examples where the present participle was used. In these cases though it was used without a subject pronoun or an auxiliary.

• Rushing to get to an interview, ...
• not looking where I was going ...
• Realising I wasn't going to get to the interview in time ...
• but looking in the mirror ...
• Phoning my interviewee back, ...
• After hanging up ...

In each example the present participle is used in a sentence where there are two clauses. In both clauses the grammatical subject is the same. In certain situations this means that we can avoid repeating the subject and we can also leave out the auxiliary. We can use a comma after the participle clause, but it is not necessary. 

Here are some of the situations when we can do this.

• When one action leads to or is the reason for another:
  Rushing to get to an interview the other day, I forgot to tie my shoe laces properly.Why did Rob forget to tie his shoes laces properly? Because he was rushing to get to an interview.
  
  ... but not looking where I was going I tripped ...Why did he trip? Because he wasn't looking where he was going.

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