Lesson: English Grammar - 10

The Horror of Vague Pronouns

First of all, let's get the relevant terms straight with the aid of the sentence below.

Example 1: Gabriela goes to the park, which she loves to visit because it is beautiful.

The first pronoun in the sentence is "which" and it's called a relative pronoun. Other common relative pronouns are "that" and "who." There's only one thing you really need to know about these pronouns: "that" and "which" refer to things, while "who" refers to people. Therefore, you'd write "The park, which is beautiful" or "The park that is beautiful," but "Gabriela, who is beautiful." The second pronoun in the sentence is "she." "He," "she," "we," "they," and even "I" are all called personal pronouns (because they stand in for people), and they are the pronouns most frequently tested. Is it clear who "she" stands for in the sentence above?

Indeed it is; "Gabriela" is the only woman in the sentence, so the pronoun must refer to her. Therefore, the pronoun is grammatically correct.

The final pronoun in the sentence is "it," an objective pronoun (since it stands in for an object, not a person) that refers to the park. The "park" is the antecedent of the pronoun, which simply means that it is the word that the pronoun replaces (Gabriela was the antecedent of the pronoun above). Whenever you see a pronoun, ask yourself what its antecedent is. If you can't tell because there's more than one option, then the pronoun is misused in the sentence and needs to be fixed. In this case, "the park" is the only possible antecedent for "it," so there's no pronoun problem.

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