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In the writing classes I teach at the Senior Center one topic invariably comes up — ambiguous antecedents. The problem is that the writer knows what they meant and can’t understand how anyone could read it any differently. Last night as I was finishing a novel I came across an stunning example. It’s the kind of thing that if you wanted to craft you couldn’t.

Since the example reveals the ending, I’ve changed what I could to make it less title-specific. Sid and Char, two TV news people from rival stations competed for a story. Sid got the big scoop in an underhanded way from Char. Char and her boss Bill are in her office watching Sid and his big story on the TV screen. The book is written from Char’s point of view, first person — the “I” in the following is her.

Sid is interviewing Mr. Jones. During the course of the interview, Jones is surprised when Sid plays an incriminating tape recording. Sid then asks, “Do you have any comment, Mr. Jones?”

Jones shook his head, stood. “I’m finished here.”

The camera angle widened to capture both men.

I ached. It should have been me on this story. It should have been me. I must have said it aloud, because Bill grunted, “Yeah, this is the kind of story that could win journalistic awards.”

“Not quite,” Sid said, standing with him. “We’ve notified the authorities, and the word is that your assistant is ready to turn state’s evidence.”

Do you see the ambiguity? MerriamWebster.org defines antecedent as “a substantive word, phrase, or clause whose denotation is referred to by a pronoun (as John in ‘Mary saw John and called to him’); broadly: a word or phrase replaced by a substitute.”

In this case, the word him in the last paragraph refers not to the noun immediately preceding it (which would be Bill), but actually refers back to Mr. Jones. The words not quite make the transition even more ambiguous because they could be understood to contradict what Bill just said about the awards, when in fact they contradict what Jones said about being finished.

At Medical News Today there’s an interesting article (under Psychiatry) about a study done with ambiguous antecedents. The example at the top of the article is pretty funny to me.

“Medicines can be harmful to young children. Make sure you keep them locked in the bathroom cabinet.” (Do we put the children or the medicines in the bathroom cabinet?)

There’s more from IBM believe it or not. You can look for yourself but this was pretty interesting (nothing to do with antecedents!)

Guideline B1-1

Do not omit prepositions or articles from sentences.

If you omit words, such as the and an, to store an otherwise long message into a pre-allocated space, the message can be interpreted in several ways.

Example: What does the message Print control file list mean?

• Print all the files that contain controls.
• A list of files that contain print controls.
• Print a list of control files.
• Print the controls and file the list.
• Control the print and list the files.
• Print and control a list of files.