In response to my post "Trigg's Rules of Grammar" [Hake (2008)],
John Clement (2008), wrote:
"I did not see in the list one of the most important rules. The use
of non specific identifiers such at it, the other one... should not
be allowed. Students use this type of construction frequently, and
when closely questioned the object they are indicating is usually not
the correct one. However, the unwary instructor can be fooled by this
type of thing. Perhaps the rule was there, but disguised."
Trigg's first rule of grammar "Make sure each pronoun agrees with
their antecedent" is related to but is not quite the same as the
notorious "ambiguous antecedent problem" pointed out by Clement.
Great minds run in the same direction. Michael McIntyre (2001)
<http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/>, of the Centre for
Atmospheric Science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and
Theoretical Physics, In "Lucidity principles in brief"
<http://tinyurl.com/2yzf78> addresses the "ambiguous antecedent
problem" as follows [bracketed by lines "MMMMM. . . . ."]:
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. . . .lucidity accelerates perceptual processing, pruning the
enormous combinatorial tree of possible internal models in the
reader's or listener's brain as quickly and appropriately as
possible, ahead of conscious thought.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Perhaps the commonest mistake is to think that a pronoun like "this"
will be as unambiguous to the reader as it is to the writer. . . . .
. . A useful and time-saving discipline is to imagine the pronoun
"this" flashing red for danger as soon as you write, type, or speak
it. A few other pronouns such as "these", "those", "it", "its",
"they" and "their" can usefully flash also, though somewhat more
slowly. The pronoun "this" is the most dangerous of all, and should
flash the fastest, because it is potentially the most ambiguous. It
might or might not refer to the thing last denoted by a noun. It
might refer to the whole of the last page or even to the whole of the
next page. The cure, very often, is to replace the pronoun by lucid
repetition of a noun or noun phrase.
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