A Word, Please: Who will thank you later? The reader

Joe and Burt talked about what he’d done wrong and how his actions led to him being fired.

An interesting story is unfolding here. Somebody screwed up. Badly. He got sacked for the blunder.

There’s just one problem: We don’t know who. Was it Joe who got fired? Or was it Burt? From this passage, it’s impossible to know. And depending on how much the reader knows already, the confusion could be more than a little annoying.

This problem has a name. It’s called an unclear antecedent. And it’s more common than you might guess. I fix a lot of these in my editing work.

An antecedent means what it sounds like: something that came before. In grammar, it’s usually a little more specific: a word that’s referred to by another word. The first one is usually a noun, the second is usually a pronoun.

“Jennifer knows she is always welcome here.” In this sentence, two words refer to the same person: Jennifer and she are one and the same. That’s clear because we understand how pronouns work. A pronoun stands in for another noun that we can glean from the context. Jennifer, then, is the antecedent of the pronoun “she.”

This concept confuses no one, yet unclear antecedents are common. The reason: when we’re writing, we’re stuck in our own heads where it’s all too easy to forget that the reader isn’t in here with us.

The solution is simple vigilance: Pay attention to your pronouns. This includes subject pronouns such as “he,” “she,” “they” and “we,” along with their object-pronoun counterparts “him,” “her,” “them” and “us.” Demonstrative pronouns such as “his,” “her” and “their” aren’t immune to problems, either. “His actions” in our first example sentence is proof.

First- and second-person pronouns “I,” “me,” “you,” “we” and “us” are less prone to confusion because there are usually fewer people to whom “I,” “me” and “you” could refer. Dialogue is the exception.

Imagine a story in which one person followed another to see where he would go. The next day, they talk.

“I saw you last night.”

“I know.”

The first speaker, you might presume, is the stalker. The second, the one who was followed. But it’s also possible that the stalkee is telling the stalker that he saw her lurking behind the mailbox on his street.

The unclear antecedents I see most often involve the pronouns “that” and “it.”

“The food is great, the service is excellent and last time we went we had no problem finding a parking space. That’s why we decided to go to Luigi’s last night.”

Wait. Why did you go to Luigi’s? Is it just the last reason, the parking business, or did you mean the food and service are factors, too? Either way, how can it be that you decided to go to Luigi’s last night because you had an easy time parking there last night?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You have to step into the reader’s shoes, ask yourself what he needs to know, then find the easiest way to deliver.

To clear up who “I” is in “I saw you last night,” you can add more information: “I saw you lurking behind the mailbox last night.” You don’t have to confine that information to the quotation, either: “I saw you last night,” Stan said.

When “that” or “it” is unclear, try to find the noun to which the pronoun is supposed to refer. If there isn’t one, try replacing the pronoun with a real noun: “The food is the reason we went to Luigi’s last night.”

The same solution applies for personal pronouns: Replace an unclear pronoun with the noun it’s meant to represent: “Joe and Burt talked about what Joe had done wrong.”

The key, as in so many writing matters, is to remember the reader.

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.