Everything English

Have you ever written an essay and received the feedback that you have an unclear antecedant and wondered what this even meant? Honestly, it isn’t an unusually difficult issue, and once we define the term and the problem, you will be able to spot them and fix them with ease.  An antecedant is a noun (a word that is a person, place, or thing) that gives meaning to a pronoun (e.g., he, him, she, her, it, they, or them) used within that same sentence or a nearby sentence.  The problem with an unclear antecedant is when a pronoun is not clearly linked to a noun to give that pronoun meaning.  This creates ambiguity in your writing.  For example, the sign in the following picture is a funny example of an unclear antecedant:

Does “it” refer to “DOG” or “POO?”  This isn’t very clear, is it?  To clarify, perhaps it would be best to avoid the pronoun altogether (i.e., “If your DOG does a POO, Please put the POO in a litter bin.”).

Happy Writing!