New Year's Resolution #6

I Will Match my Pronoun to its Antecedent

How pleasant it is to match one's pronouns to one's nouns.

It's believed that goldfish have five second memories.  It's a fact that most writers do.  Within the course of one sentence, many of us lose track of the noun to which we're referring.  We end up with an "its" that refers to a plural noun or series of nouns, or more commonly, a "they" that refers to a singular noun.

It doesn't help that there's no informal gender-neutral pronoun for "a person" in English.  Instead, we're stuck dealing with this "one" or "his or her" business.  And then we sound like Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice:

"How pleasant it is to have one's house to oneself again."

She's grammatically correct, but ugh. Who wants to sound like that?

But I digress.  The reality is, we're operating in a language that does not have a convenient gender-neutral pronoun for the third person singular, and we have to work with what we've got.  Check pronouns against their antecedents,  k?