Using Pronouns Professionally and Clearly

Part II: Preparing, Presenting and Polishing Your Work – Chapter 4

4.4.3 Using Pronouns Professionally and Clearly

Pronouns are among the most friendly features of language: they allow the author (or speaker) to say what needs to be said with much greater efficiency and elegance than would be possible were he or she obliged to repeatedly use the same noun or noun phrase several times even within the same sentence. However, pronouns can also be among the most user-unfriendly features of academic or scientific prose. There are times in creative writing when ambiguity about the meaning of a pronoun is deliberate and effective, but in scholarly writing, the meaning of a pronoun should be obvious and certain (and any rare instances of deliberate ambiguity explained, as I explain the use of ‘them’ for both ideas and readers in Section 4.4.1 above, or clearly justified by the material). This means that the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent should be clearly established so that no doubt about the meaning of the pronoun exists. For example, in ‘The mother thought the boy was lost. He was actually at a friend’s house,’ ‘He’ can only refer to the boy, so there’s no risk of confusion. However, in ‘The boy lost his old dog Jake. He was actually at a friend’s house,’ the antecedent of ‘He’ is not clear. Since the ‘boy’ is the subject of the 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.

The practice of putting yourself into the shoes of your reader and viewing your own writing from as objective a perspective as you can possibly manage can be surprisingly enlightening and incredibly helpful. If you’re able to achieve a little distance from your work, you’ll also be able to read it as you might read the scholarly work of colleagues, and while this can assist you with managing far more than pronouns, it will almost always reveal problematic uses of pronouns that contribute to an unprofessional written voice. I am referring specifically here to the use in scholarly prose of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ (and ‘us’ and ‘our’ in the other declensions). ‘We’ can be used with impunity in academic or scientific writing if it refers specifically to the authors, and ‘I’ is equally acceptable for a single author. In fact, ‘I’ when used with discretion is often preferable to a third-person circumlocution such as ‘the present author’ and ‘we’ more appropriate than, say, ‘the present investigators.’ The two (‘I’ and ‘we’) should not be mixed, however: a paper either has one or more than one author, so it’s either ‘I’ or ‘we,’ not one in one paragraph and the other in the next. ‘We’ can also be used successfully (though with care) when referring to researchers or practitioners as a group, such as ‘we ethnographers’ or ‘we as surgeons,’ especially when your work relates to methodology and self-awareness.

‘We’ should not be used in scholarly writing, however, in a general or fictional sense that implicitly includes the readers or even the whole of humanity. Generalising, as any researcher knows, is a dangerous business, and when you include your readers in that ‘we,’ you also (usually unwittingly) imply that your readers are thinking exactly what you are. Assuming that your readers are thinking as you are can be one of the most certain and instantaneous ways in which to lose your readers’ sympathy. ‘We can observe that…,’ ‘We see here…,’ ‘We now know that…,’ ‘We human beings do not…’ and similar phrases can rapidly become irritating, especially if the author has not provided the results or explanation to shore up the claim. The job of the academic or scientific author is to show, explain, persuade, even defend when necessary with regard to his or her discoveries, but never to assume that the reader is already convinced or to use that assumption as a way in which to develop an argument or as a substitute for scholarly argumentation. ‘We observed that…,’ ‘We saw…,’ ‘We discovered that…’ (with the ‘We’ applying to the authors in each case) and ‘Human participants in this study did not…’ all report results, and therefore present evidence and advance an academic or scientific argument. What your readers see or think or discover may or may not do so, and assuming (even unwittingly) that what’s going on in your mind is also going on in the minds of your readers often means ignoring the potential for many different responses and interpretations. So while it is good to anticipate the needs of your readers, the best way to meet those needs is to rely on what’s going on in your own mind and do your very best to share that clearly and thoughtfully in your writing. So check your use of ‘we’ carefully as you proofread and revise your paper, and if there’s no specific and appropriate antecedent for it, devise a different way to express your thoughts.

‘You’ should also be avoided in academic and scientific prose. This is rarely a problem for authors as ‘we’ tends to be, but since I use the second-person voice so frequently in this Guide to facilitate concise expression of the advice I’m offering you as an academic or scientific author working toward publication, I thought I best mention it. My practice in this regard is a good example, then, of anticipating the perspective and needs of readers, yet also a classic case of do what I say, but not exactly what I do: in most contexts using ‘you’ simply establishes too personal a voice for formal academic or scientific writing.

Even the use of ‘he,’ ‘she’ and ‘they’ can be fraught with difficulties, particularly because of the need to avoid gender-specific language. The matter is straightforward when speaking of a male or female subject, but when your language needs to be more general, problems can arise. Some writers would argue that ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘their’ are acceptable, non-gender-specific substitutes for the singular forms ‘he or she,’ ‘him or her’ and ‘his or her.’ However, ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘their’ are plural, so they are not appropriate or correct with reference to singular nouns, and using them as though they are can quickly become extremely confusing. So when you use something like ‘a person,’ you need to use a singular pronoun: ‘when a person considers the idea, he or she also realises…,’ not ‘when a person considers the idea, they also realise.’ Finally, a human being, person, participant, interviewee, mother, man, teenager or girl is never an ‘it,’ so do be sure to use ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘they’ (or ‘him,’ ‘her’ or ‘them’ in the objective cases and ‘his,’ ‘her’ and ‘their’ in the possessive) when referring to a person. Relative pronouns should be used similarly: ‘the man who did that’ or ‘the participant who scored highest,’ not ‘the man that did that’ or ‘the participant that scored highest.’

Such careful usage will not only render your writing clearer and more precise, it will also keep the human element alive in your prose along with scholarly formality. Avoiding the use of a generalising ‘we’ and a ‘you’ that’s too direct does not mean that you should remove the human element from your prose, and there are a variety of ways to retain this element. Sometimes when reporting complex methods and data while working within tight word limits, an author can let words that assert the presence of human participants in a study fall to the wayside. Most common is the tendency for patients or participants suffering from a particular disease or ailment to be reduced through a kind of shorthand to the disease or ailment. While this sort of language is sometimes necessary to convey results efficiently, it should be avoided as much as possible, and certainly not used when first introducing the participants in your study. Some journals have rather strict guidelines about referring to research participants – some of them even frowning upon the use of ‘subjects’ instead of ‘individuals’ or ‘people’ – so do be sure to check the journal guidelines before making final decisions about such matters.

PRS Tip: The proofreaders at PRS are well educated in a variety of disciplines and all of us are experts in the English language. We know how a scholarly paper in English should read because we are scholars, and some of us have published our own academic or scientific writing. So there’s a great deal we can do to help you make your scholarly voice just what it should be, but it’s essential that you do everything you can to ensure that your vocabulary, grammar and syntax are as correct and clear as possible. Remember that if a seasoned professional proofreader familiar with academic and scientific prose, the specific discipline and the errors commonly encountered when working across languages isn’t able to make sense of what you’re trying to say, it’s very difficult to provide assistance. When we read papers for our clients, we strike up a dialogue in marginal comments, and this is a good way for clients to start a dialogue with us as well. So if you’re having trouble with a particular construction or a specific section in your paper, explain the problem as well as you can in a comment. If you’re translating a quoted passage, let us know it’s your translation and we’ll check the English and improve it if necessary. This sort of proactive approach will help us direct attention where it is most needed and help you maximise the effect of the money you spend on professional proofreading.