Dreadfully puzzling

"If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him,” according to the Mad Hatter.



A problem is seeping into writing like the coal ashes from a Tennessee power plant into the Emory River, almost imperceptibly, yet perniciously. The problem is called unclear reference, the ambiguous use of pronouns.
Pronouns are stand-ins for nouns. We use them (the pronoun them, for instance, here stands in for the word pronoun) in order to avoid excessive repetition of the same word or name. However, it gets tricky when a pronoun could theoretically refer to more than one antecedent, the word it replaces.
To curb the environmental hazards of the 2009 Tennessee accident, the ashes are removed from the Emory River. “Sediment can be seen in the Emory River as machines pump it into holding ponds.” Even though we can logically infer that the river’s water is pumped into ponds where it then can be cleaned, the sentence itself is ambiguous. The antecedent of the “it” the machines are pumping could be the noun “sediment” or the name “Emory River.” Neither really makes sense because one cannot pump sediment or an entire river into holding ponds. The only substance that can be pumped is the water of the Emory River; yet the writer does not mention the word “water." It is up to the reader to read it into the sentence, to see it between the lines, and to clean up the muddy mess-age.
One citizen, who directly is affected by this disaster, says that he wants “to plant a garden. I’m concerned about it getting in the soil.” “It” can here only refer to the antecedent “garden,” yet that’s clearly not what the aspiring gardener implies, who is concerned about the spillage polluting the ground ("In Aftermath of A Spill, A New Round of Challenges" NYT 3/7).
Newspapers are full of such disasters. (Pun intended.) The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are just the most recent ones, and since time immemorial, disasters are accompanied by looting. For example, “In 1911, Sicilians dodged lava flowing out of Mount Etna to loot homes abandoned in its path.” Whose paths? Although the closest antecedent would be Mount Etna, the reader correctly assumes that the pronoun refers to “lava” ("The Rough Morality of Up-For-Grabs" NYT 3/7). Again, the reader must do the writer’s job and clarify the connection.
Dodging blow-ups and spills is probably routine for a president’s political advisor. “David Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision” ("The White House Message Maven" NYT 3/7). While “He sits in… meetings” clearly refers to Axelrod, “the last person he talks to before making a decision” must be the president. Again, the reader simply uses his (or her) common sense to get a message whose rendering is incorrect and fuzzy.


A pronoun should refer clearly to one, definite noun.
This noun, coming before the pronoun, is called the pronoun’s antecedent.
Take the car out of the garage and clean it. What needs to be cleaned? The garage? Most likely, if the sentence was spoken in California. The car? Just as seemly a guess.
When the party finally reached an agreement, it was in tatters. Was the party in tatters or the agreement?

A pronoun should not refer to an implied idea.
When the antecedent is implied instead of explicitly stated, the reader has to guess the sentence's meaning:
Pearl S. Buck received much critical praise and earned over $7 million, but she was very modest about it. She was probably modest about her success.

The antecedent should not be remote.
In Euripides’ Medea, he describes the plight of a woman rejected by her husband. It is much clearer to say that "In Medea, Euripides describes the plight of a woman rejected by her husband."