55 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality first sentence, the reader might expect ‘He’ to refer to the ‘boy,’ but it could also refer to the male ‘dog Jake,’ so confusion is created about what is actually being said, and thus about the implications of the text. Is the dog safe at a friend’s house, or did the boy lose the dog at a friend’s house and thus in a less familiar and potentially more dangerous landscape? Is there continuing cause for worry or not? Those examples are extremely simple. When a long and complex sentence reporting and discussing detailed results and conclusions opens with ‘It’ and contains a couple more instances of that pronoun as well as a ‘they’ and a ‘them,’ determining what the author means can become absolutely impossible, especially if that author is also dealing with the challenge of writing in a language not his or her own and perhaps used one ‘it’ when referring to a plural antecedent and ‘they’ for a singular one by mistake. In most cases, five pronouns are too many for a sentence in any case, but whether you have many or only one pronoun in a sentence, it is vital that your reader is able to identify the antecedent(s) readily and with certainty. Sometimes the grammar checking function in Word will catch an incorrectly or oddly used pronoun, but much like the spell check function, this is far from reliable. So read your sentences over carefully and whenever you encounter a pronoun, ask yourself if its meaning might possibly be unclear – not to you, but to a reader who can’t know what you’re saying unless you express your meaning effectively – and if there’s any doubt, use a noun or noun phrase instead. Because using pronouns too extensively can tend to distance not only the reader but also the writer from precisely what he or she is saying, analysing your text in this way can actually help you clarify your forms of expression in ways that reach far beyond pronouns, much as writing the meaning of Latin abbreviations out in your text can. Using one thing for another is only a successful policy if both you and your reader know exactly what the replacement represents. PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk