Pronoun reference means that every pronoun (he, she, it, they, this, which) points back to one clear noun. If a reader has to stop and ask “who?” or “what?”, the pronoun is unclear. This matters in every writing task in First Language English, because unclear reference is one of the quickest ways to lose the reader’s trust.
It is the first skill in paragraph cohesion, and the rest of the module builds on it.
How do you check a pronoun?
A pronoun stands in for a noun you have already named, called its antecedent. A safe pronoun passes three checks:
- One candidate. Only one noun before it could fit. If two could fit, the reader has to guess.
- Close enough. The noun is in the same sentence or the one just before. A noun three sentences back is too far.
- Actually there. The noun is written down. “They say it is hard” has no noun for “they” to point to.
Your own mind fills the gaps automatically, so you cannot catch these by rereading quickly. Slow down and, for each pronoun, say aloud which noun it replaces.
Worked example
Here is a first draft:
Hana and her cousin Mei entered the fair with a water filter and a poster. She built the filter and painted the poster, but it was the one that impressed the judges.
Step 1, circle the pronouns: “She” and “it”.
Step 2, name each antecedent. “She” could be Hana or Mei, since both are female and both were named just before. “It” could be the filter or the poster. Both pronouns fail the “one candidate” check.
Step 3, decide what you mean. Suppose Mei built the filter and Hana painted the poster, and the judges liked the filter.
Step 4, repair by naming the nouns where the doubt is:
Hana and her cousin Mei entered the fair with a water filter and a poster. Mei built the filter and Hana painted the poster, but the filter impressed the judges.
Notice that we did not remove every pronoun. We only replaced the ones that could point two ways. Writing “Hana” and “Mei” in every sentence would sound heavy.
The mistake to watch for
A very common slip is the bare “this” at the start of a sentence.
The filter cost very little to make. This impressed the judges.
What impressed them: the low cost, the filter itself, or the fact that it worked? The reader cannot tell. The correction is to add a noun after “this”.
The filter cost very little to make. This low cost impressed the judges.
Now “this” has a clear target. Adding one noun after “this”, “that” or “which” is usually the quickest repair.
Check yourself
1. Rewrite so the pronoun is clear: “When Amir passed the ball to Zack, he was standing alone near the goal.”
Show answer
“He” could be Amir or Zack. A clear version, assuming Zack was alone: “Zack was standing alone near the goal when Amir passed him the ball.” Another good answer simply uses “Zack” in place of “he”.
2. What is wrong with this sentence, and how would you fix it? “The printer jammed the laptop’s file, and it had to be restarted.”
Show answer
“It” could mean the printer, the laptop or the file. Decide which one you mean and name it: “The printer jammed the laptop’s file, so the printer had to be restarted.” A smoother rewrite is “The printer jammed on the laptop’s file and had to be restarted.”
3. Is the pronoun clear here? “Ali lost the key on the way home. This made him late.”
Show answer
It is clear enough, because only one event comes before “this”. A noun would still make it sharper: “This loss made him late.” Keep the bare “this” for cases like this one, where there is only one possible target.
Where this leads next
Clear pronouns tell the reader who is acting. The next step is to show how sentences relate to each other, which is covered in use transitions that express the actual relationship. When you can repair pronouns on your own, test yourself with the paragraph cohesion practice set, and compare a draft before and after editing with the writing revision compare view.
Some students can spot the fault in someone else’s paragraph but not in their own, because they already know what they meant. A teacher reading over your shoulder in online one-to-one English First Language tuition can be the reader your draft needs.