How Clear Must an Antecedent Be?

 

A while back, I got an e-mail from a reader named Randy who had come across this passage in a news article: "Pat Haden didn't fire Kiffin. He fired himself. 

"What does this technically mean? " Randy asked. "Who fired himself? Who is out of a job? Haden or Kiffin?"

In fact, Randy already knew who got fired. And any reader who knew that Haden was the one with the power to fire someone probably didn't have any trouble figuring out the sentence. Still, Randy was troubled by the imprecision of it all. Plus he had vague recollections of being taught that the last noun to come before a pronoun is necessarily its antecedent.

"I see a lot of sentences where it seems the writer simply relies on me to intuit who or what the pronouns refer to by the context of the sentence(s). In other words, I should 'know what the writer means'… pay no attention to what the sentence really says. And maybe that’s  a valid position? Maybe context defines usage? I doubt that, but who knows, anymore."

Here's what I told Randy:

The problem you're writing about is call an "unclear antecedent." Exactly as you described, it occurs when a pronoun's "antecedent" -- the thing or person to which it refers -- is unclear.

If I were copyediting an article and saw this sentence, “Pat Haden didn’t fire Kiffin. He fired himself.” I would absolutely replace the word "he" with either Haden or Kiffin (whoever did the firing).

To me, even if a reader who applies analytical efforts to the sentence can figure out who dunnit, it doesn't matter. The act and the responsibility of writing are to explain things -- not to burden the reader to puzzle them out.

Any pronoun that requires some prior knowledge on the reader's part is not okay with me. If it's not clear from the article alone who did the firing, then a pronoun with an unclear antecedent should be replaced by a noun that leaves no doubt.

 

 

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