{"id":308,"date":"2008-04-15T14:04:23","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T04:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/?p=308"},"modified":"2011-05-23T14:59:21","modified_gmt":"2011-05-23T04:59:21","slug":"he-isnt-a-good-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/2008\/04\/he-isnt-a-good-start\/","title":{"rendered":"He isn’t a good start"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0As much as possible, avoid starting any sentence with a pronoun*. Sometimes the pronoun will clearly refer to one person, but often the pronoun is confusing so it is safest to avoid it.<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

I recently read the following in a book: “As Linda came back into the room, she saw Claire was back from lunch. She smiled at Marie then called Bill.” The question is, who smiled at Marie and rang Bill? The author meant Linda but grammatically the ‘she’ of the second sentence is Claire.<\/p>\n

In business writing, that sort of confusion could lead to misunderstandings about who was to do certain tasks, or just annoy the reader so they will take their business elsewhere. Use a name or title to start a sentence for clarity.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

*For the sake of clear communication, a pronoun is a word that can be used instead of a noun – for example, she, he and it are common pronouns.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0As much as possible, avoid starting any sentence with a pronoun*. Sometimes the pronoun will clearly refer to one person, but often the pronoun is confusing so it is safest to avoid it. I recently read the following in a book: “As Linda came back into the room, she saw Claire was back from lunch. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[86,177,178,180,176,179,1721],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar-details-2","tag-business","tag-confusing","tag-he","tag-misunderstandings","tag-pronoun","tag-she","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t