An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Four -- I held it and realised its pronoun was ambiguous

Pronouns are a part of grammar that are having their day in the sun at the moment, because of our collective attempt to fix some of the bugs in our culture through our language. That's good: knowing what a pronoun is will help you get your teeth into this section. Here I'm going to talk about a common error with pronouns, one that almost always provokes unintentional mirth from your reader. And we don't want that, now, do we?

First, let's remind ourselves how they actually work. Make of this what you will:

Lucas sat in the chair. Lucas liked the chair. Lucas wanted to look out the window, so that Lucas could see the subjects that Lucas ruled with an iron fist. Lucas was happy.

There's no pronouns there, and it feels very childlike. We imagine that this might be a caveman or the Hulk: in other words, dropping pronouns is a cliched shorthand for someone primitive.

Perhaps that's a trope because our minds do an unbelievable amount of work when we read, and pronoun substitution is definitely one of the more complicated jobs. Thanks to the complicated machinery in your skull, we can rewrite the previous example, like this.

Lucas sat in the chair. He liked it. He wanted to look out the window, so that he could see the subjects that he ruled with an iron fist. Lucas was happy.

I kept the last 'Lucas' for comic effect; it maintains the childishness of it.

Notice how you know exactly which noun a particular pronoun refers to. The gender and grammatical number of the pronoun helps you, here. You know what gender means; grammatical number is the fancy phrase that says whether a word is singular or plural. They both have to be the same as the gender and grammatical number of the noun that the pronoun refers to.

So, we didn't refer to the chair or window as 'he', because chairs don't conventionally have a gender; we didn't call the subjects 'it' or 'he' because subjects are plural and 'it' and 'he' are singular. However, there's still a lot of potential ambiguity here. Your job, when you're line editing, is to make sure there's none.

Try this.

He picked up the cake, and held it up to the light. It was small and heavy, and would surely feed the vampires.

You can see what the problem here is, right? That's right: the 'it' is ambiguous. Fascinatingly, you actually know what it refers to, for two reasons: you've reinforced the use of 'it' as the cake, so your brain sorta goes with it, and obviously because draculas won't eat lights. But it's still the kind of thing that the haters can scoff about; and, more importantly, you're piling more work onto your reader.

So here's a simple rule. Whenever you use a pronoun, make sure that it refers to the most recently mentioned noun phrase of that gender and grammatical number. That sounds a mouthful, but it's the intuitive way that you think pronouns should work. In other words, when you see a pronoun, scan back until you hit a noun that agrees with the pronoun, and that's what your reader will think that the pronoun refers to.

Using that rule, in the above sentence, we're wrong; the last 'it' should refer to the light.

These can be quite hard to correct. In this case, the light doesn't really bring anything to the table, so I'm just going to ditch it.

He picked up the cake. It was small and heavy, and would surely feed the vampires.

You need to treat these case by case. It's a tough old one, this, but I promise you, it's worth it!

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So, what words do you need to search? Lawks a lordy, it's the pronouns. You'll probably have a fair number of them, so this could be pretty daunting! But the reality is I and everyone else only seem to make this mistake with 'it': I have no deep psychological theory as to why this might be, but maybe it means you only need to search for that?

By the way, if you don't believe me that we do lots of hard work when we read pronoun substitution, go and read the section on 'anaphora (linguistics)' in Wikipedia.

Now, as always, let me know your deepest thoughts in the comments!