An Example of Participial Clause

The following is a good example of participial clause from TIME (December 3, 2012).

Sweet Charity

by Joel Stein

"Having written a book, created my own cologne, amassed nearly a million Twitter followers, been cited in a Supreme Court decision, modeled for W magazine and smoothly bragged about all this in my TIME magazine column, I have reached the point in my career when I need my own charity."

The main clause is "I have reached the point in my career when I need my own charity."  All the words before it, in the form of participial clause are used to tell us the condition of  the main clause.  We can tranform the participial clause into "After I have written a book, created my own cologne..."    The participial clause simplifies the sentence so that the subject "I" doesn't need to be written twice.

Many English learners find it hard to understand such a long sentence.   All they have to do is locate the main verb "have," which won't come in the participial form, and its subject "I."  Then they know that the part before the main clause is just a modifier.