Handling pronouns with unclear antecedents

MANY years ago, a prestigious testing organization in the United States had to rescore the test papers of over 500,000 test-takers when it found out that one of its grammar questions could be answered in two ways. The problematic passage in the error identification test was this:

«Toni Morrison's genius enables (A) her to create novels (B) that arise from © and express the injustice African Americans (D) have endured. (E) No error.»

The test developer's intended answer was, of course, "(E) No error," but someone persuasively countered that "(A) her to create novels" was grammatically wrong and should then be the correct answer. The argument: Although it could be assumed that «her» in choice (A) refers to Toni Morrison herself, some grammar books actually frown on such a construction, pointing out that a pronoun shouldn't refer to a noun in the possessive case (in this case, «Toni Morrison's») when the noun is functioning as a modifier.

To make the test sentence scrupulously correct and retain the "(E) No error" answer, the problematic statement had to be revised as follows:

«Toni Morrison's genius enables (A) Morrison to create novels (B) that arise from © and express the injustice African Americans (D) have endured. (E) No error.»

The above revision isn't a very elegant sentence, of course, but the grammar flaw that prompted it clearly illustrates the need to avoid using pronouns with unclear or ambiguous antecedents. For admittedly, someone who doesn't know that Toni Morrison is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist — someone who could be, say, a Martian visiting the Earth a century from now — could very well accept Morrison's literary genius semantically but would never be sure if the «her» in the sentence was Morrison herself.

We can see that the responsibility to be clear about things is the writer's, not the reader's.

Errors that stem from such unclear antecedents of pronouns come in three types: unidentified reference, indefinite reference, and ambiguous reference. They thrive on the writer's assumption — often wrong — that readers will somehow know what is obvious in his or her mind. The antidote for the resulting vagueness, of course, is to