Consider this sentence:
? A supermarket supervisor has been charged with the attempted murder of his boss at a New Year’s Eve party, and with the murder of his wife two days later.
Whose wife was murdered?
Pronouns are a useful way of avoiding tedious repetition. But because they have so many uses they are potentially ambiguous. Whenever a sentence becomes ambiguous, try to rectify it by making matters explicit. Here the obvious ways would be:
. . . the murder of his own wife. . . . . . the murder of the boss’s wife. . .
Even if the meaning of a pronoun is clear from the context, the effect may be absurd: ? If your child dislikes spinach, try steaming it. Careful speakers would repeat the noun here- . . . try steaming the spinach – or, better still, invert the order: Try steaming spinach if your child dislikes it.
Another dangerous way of treating pronouns is to leave them hanging in mid-air, with no noun to refer to. The following is ungrammatical:
X. Even if you dream only occasionally, you should write them down.
Write what down? The sentence would be better as:
Even if you have dreams only occasionally, you should write them down.
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