Why I Avoid Pronouns

The rule is that a pronoun is supposed to refer to the noun closest before it (the antecedent), so the cartoonist has a point.

The closest noun is “tires”…

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I mentioned this several times in the past. Pronouns are tricky because figuring out the antecedent can be tricky. (The antecedent is the word the pronoun refers to.) And that trickiness is the basis of the humor in this Grizzwells comic:

The writing rule: Avoid pronouns whenever you can.

That headline is a bit strong, but I want to keep the title to this post short.

To clarify,

• I generally recommend against pronouns altogether because your reader might not understand what word (called the antecedent, by the way) the pronoun is referring to. Do a search on “pronoun” in the upper right corner of this page to find several more posts on the subject of avoiding pronouns.
• I also tell you not to use false subjects, one of which is “It is.” See also “There is” and “There are.” Make your sentences name the guilty party!

Here’s a comic that illustrates a point I made in that post about false subjects; the weather can have a false subject:

Mr. Bucket’s hair looks funny drawn from the back.

Remember, folks, this site is not about politics. I ran into a sentence in a political context, though, that is such an excellent example of why I recommend against pronouns, that I have to quote it.

“The president believes in making sure that information is accurate before pushing it out as fact, when it certainly and clearly is not.”

What does that second “it” refer to? I predict that people will choose the antecedent based on their politics. And well they might. The sentence is not a good one, semantically speaking. It is hard to tell what the sentence literally means.

The rule with pronouns is that they should refer to the closest noun. This rule is so easy to break that ambiguity often results, and that’s the case here, and ambiguity is not something you want in a contentious environment.

I think this is what the speaker intended to mean (edited to remove ambiguity):

“The president believes in making sure that information is accurate before pushing [the information] out as fact, [especially] when the [so-called] information certainly and clearly is not accurate [to start with].”

Here’s what the grammar says:

“The president believes in making sure that information is accurate before pushing [the information] out as fact, when the [claimed] fact certainly and clearly is not accurate.”

I think That’s what was meant. Hard to tell. The second version is self-contradictory. Don’t jump all over me if you think I got it wrong, but feel free to put your own translation in the comments.

The rule: avoid pronouns. Say exactly what you mean.

Really concise today…

https://comicskingdom.com/mallard-fillmore/2017-04-29  Bruce Tinsley

My solution is to avoid pronouns. Pronouns are an easy source of accidental ambiguity. The singular “they” goes back to Milton or Chaucer, so the duck can’t really object to the usage.

We have no gender neutral singular pronouns in English–you can’t have a group of a singular, but in our current culture, it’s less in style to be so specific, although sometimes you don’t know the gender. Sex, btw is the biological term, gender is grammar, though our culture has started using gender to refer to sexual preferences.