A cardinal rule of writing is that our meaning must be clear. Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote “Treasure Island” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” is widely credited with this axiom: “Don’t write merely to be understood. Write so you can’t possibly be misunderstood.”

That’s good advice. But our writing may slip into being misunderstood if we’re not clear in our use of antecedents.

What are antecedents? An antecedent is a word, phrase, or sentence that another word refers to.

For example, an antecedent may be a person’s name that’s replaced by a pronoun later in the sentence, like this:

          When Sheila was in college she earned a 4.0 grade point average.

Sheila is the antecedent that she refers to. The pronoun she is called a pro-form, which means it stands in for, or refers to, another term. In this case she is the pro-form of the proper noun Sheila. (Now you know how pronouns got their names. The word pro can mean for, and pronouns stand in for nouns.)

Sometimes, however, the antecedent isn’t clear. That may happen if the pro-form could possibly refer to two or more terms. Here’s an example:

           As the dog jumped on the couch it groaned.

The word it is the pro-form, but what does it refer to? The dog? Or the couch? Which one groaned?

To fix this sentence we could write:

            As the dog jumped on the couch the dog groaned.

or

            As the dog jumped on the couch the couch groaned.

But you readily see the awkwardness of either of those sentences, so let’s the sentence change to:

            The dog groaned as it jumped on the couch.

or

            The couch groaned as the dog jumped on it.

Note also that pro-forms may reference an understood, but not stated, term. A colleague in one of my writing groups wrote this:

            Because it was hot I jumped in the pool.

What does it refer to? What was hot? At first glance it seems obvious—it must refer to air temperature. The character needed to cool off by jumping in the pool. But we could interpret the sentence like this:

            “Because the pool was hot I jumped in,” implying that the character was cold and needed to warm up.

To fix this issue we could add the unstated term and write:

            Because the air temperature was hot I jumped in the pool.

But that’s not how people speak and therefore doesn’t sound authentic. How can we fix the sentence?

In the “couch groaned” sentence above we changed word order to clarify the meaning, so let’s try that here:

             I jumped in the pool because it was hot.

That doesn’t help. In fact, now we’re worse off because it sounds for sure like the pool was hot and we mean the air was.

I suggested to my colleague that he or substitute more a descriptive term for it, such as:

            The thermometer read 95 degrees, so I jumped in the pool.

That change solves the problem.

Finally, note that many times antecedents are unclear because of indefinite words, such as this, that, or it. The dog/couch sentence was an example. So if you write one of those words ask yourself if the meaning is clear. If not, rewrite the sentence so it “can’t possibly be misunderstood.”

I intentionally used it in the preceding sentence so I could ask myself, and you, “Is there any way my readers could misunderstand that the antecedent of it is sentence?” What do you think?