Writing Tips and Reviews

Pronoun Game

I have underestimated how long it would take to write about team building. I guess it's my fault for looking at the specifics of three games and my series. At least it's informative.

I want to talk about the pronoun game, if you want to do more research, Purdue Online Writing Lab has an entire page on it. Just look up "writing with pronouns". You'll find it.

Who's being talked about?:

This is about characters. If you've read any of my work, you'll see that I am specific in who's talking. If Arjuna's action is stated first, he gets the pronoun of "he" while Karna gets his name stated or "the Lancer" if I've said his name too many times. If you can avoid saying a work multiple times, do it.

"She asked her." This is a problem, I don't know who's being talked about, even if there were names stated before, it's not an automatic process to figure it out. "Sara and Vanessa walked down the street, she asked her about her time at the amusement park and she said..." what the hell is happening? You can't expect the readers to go back into a sentence and deconstruct it just to make sense of it. Because that's not what they should be doing.

"Ana asked her." This is better.

"She asked Lily." This is the same thing with the roles switched.

"Ana asked Lily". This the best when their names aren't stated before.

Whoever's name is stated first usually gets the pronoun, everyone else gets their name stated. "Ana greeted Lily at the park, she asked Lily about..." it's obvious who "she" is because her name is stated first.

To add on, "whether he liked it or not, James had to accept his position as team leader" also works.

Don't address your audience:

Don't break the fourth wall.

"Agree in person. If you are writing in the first person (I), don't confuse your reader by switching to the second person (you) or third person (he, she, they, it, etc.)."

"The room was lit up and he looked at the ceiling. You could see the lights were like stars and you felt like it was a dream." Nope, not how that works. What are you writing? A comedy?

"The room was lit up and he looked at the ceiling. The lights were like stars and it felt like a dream."

I see way too many people do this, especially in bios, which, they're not stories so maybe they don't count.

"He could be mean to you until you get to know him." I haven't seen any games introduce characters this way, so I'm going to say it's breaking the rules.

"He could be mean but has a softer side when talked to more." There we go.

Stay consistent with numbers:

"The girls pulled out their umbrellas". It's a plural word so a plural pronoun is used. Simple.