Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Antecedents and Grammar: Is It Really a Problem?

By Weston Ochse

We all started somewhere. None of us appeared as fully-formed writers able to detect passive voice after that first gurgling breath.

This was especially true for me. My journey to grammatical confidence was a long one. Even after high school, it took a while to figure out what the teacher really meant when she explained to the whole class the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. I was too busy reading ahead in my literary reader, so it wasn’t until later that a friend in a critique group pointed out the difference to me along with the usage.

Grammar came to be at odd times. Sometimes I’d parse the information on my own while reading a novel or the bathroom wall at a truck stop. Other times I’d have to ask, usually depending on fellow writers, professors and critique groups for charity. On rare occasions, an editor would point out my flaws in a crimped and harried hand, barely legible instructions scrawled in the margins of a form rejection which I treasured and tried to decipher as if it were a map I’d been handed to the secret island of Published Professionals, hidden behind a layer of clouds far out in the Sea of Perseverance. On the rarest of occasions, an editor would set aside his or her own time and prepare a rejection letter detailing my grammatical malfeasance in such a way that I could not help but realize that my writing has been grotesquely suffering from ignorance.

This happened to me in 1997 the first year I began to write. Among the stories that will never see print is one called A Popular Judgment– a preachy morality tale thinly disguised as a JRR Tolkien meets Judge Roy Bean meets LA Law sword and sorcery melodrama. I remember thinking at the time that my talent was extraordinary, my plotting visionary, and the story an amazing contribution to literature. I knew in my heart of hearts that the story was destined to be placed in the Hall of the Literary King so that those few worthy souls who dared the perilous trek to grammatical excellence, could look upon it with reverent awe at the Temple at the End of the World, knowing that they could never equal the story in quality or insightfulness.

What was amazing was that it didn’t end up in the trash. For my first rejection for this story was from the magazine World’s of Fantasy and Horror, formerly and currently known to the world as Weird Tales. The rejection letter ran four pages of evenly spaced, informative and forever helpful guidance on all of the rules of grammar I’d deftly avoided while writing the story. This was no form letter, but a personalized indictment on my skill as a fictionalist, one which I took as divine guidance, instead of devilish damnation.

Among the many rules I’d trampled in my haste to see my words in print had to do with a little known (to me) concept called ‘the antecedent.’ You may have heard of this pesky invention, particularly in reference to pronouns. Clearly I had never heard of it, for the phrase ‘your continual and repeated misuse of antecedents to their pronouns rendered many passages indecipherable’ caught me entirely off guard. At first I was certain the editors were having their way with me. I figured they’d jerked the word from the ether, laid it on the page, and sent it to me, them all sitting on their thrones in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, snorting beers and laughing at my expense. So, not quite believing that my stellar writing was as indecipherable as described, and thinking the editor may have been a few beers short of an 18 Pack, I checked the dictionary. To my profound amazement, I discovered that the word did exist. Antecedent was an actual word.

Here–

From Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Main Entry: an•te•ced•ent
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Medieval Latin & Latin; Medieval Latin antecedent-, antecedens, from Latin, what precedes, from neuter of antecedent-, antecedens, present participle of antecedere to go before, from ante- + cedere to go
1 : 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.

Seeing as how it was a real word, and not something created in an anagram engine, I was beginning to see an inkling of what they meant. After all, I had a whole bunch of pronouns in the story. I thought I knew what they were doing, but maybe they’d gotten out of control, which pronouns were prone to if left unattended.

Deciding that I’d go to the Master of All Things Grammatical to solve this problem, I called my mother and the conversation went something like this–

Me: “Hi mom. What’s incorrect use of an antecedent to a pronoun mean?”

Mom: “Hi son. I’m fine thank you. So is your father, although I keep telling him he needs to lose some weight. Too much butter, you know. Now what was your question?”

Me: “What’s incorrect use of an antecedent to a pronoun mean? I mean if I was to use this antecedent-thingy incorrectly what would happen?”

Mom: “Did you get another rejection?”

Me: “Saying I did, and pretending that I got a letter telling me that I incorrectly used the antecedent to pronouns, what would that mean?”

Mom: “You know you really should have finished college.”

Me: “Mom. Concentrate.”

Mom: “I’m just saying. They would have taught that to you in college had you attended and not decided to party your scholarship away.”

Me: “Mom. I’m going to hang up.”

Mom: Sighing dramatically, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. He fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Who fell down?”

Me: “What are you– Oh! That’s easy. Jack fell down.”

Mom: “And you know that because there is only one male in the preceding sentence to which the pronoun ‘he’ referred. Now, try this one. Jack and Bill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. He fell down and broke his crown and he came tumbling after. Who fell down?”

Me: “That’s just crazy. Why would Jack and Bill go up a hill?”

Mom: “Concentrate and answer the question.”

Me: “I can’t answer the question. Who’s this Bill guy anyway? I’ve never even heard of him. I have no idea who fell down. I don’t know who broke their crown. I can’t tell if it was Jack or Bill? “

Mom: “Exactly. Now go look at your story and see if there are any Jack or Bills.”

Me: “What? Who?”

And she left me to figure the rest of it out on my own. Now my Mom was a HS English Teacher, so she had more than a passing acquaintance with the rules of grammar and in her inimical way was able to teach me what I’d failed to comprehend in school, glean off the page of a novel, or parse from the wall of a men’s room. Additionally, I’ve never consciously made that mistake again, often reading back over a manuscript specifically looking for antecedent errors.

Antecedents can be troublesome. I’ve included a link for some rules and examples of other ways they can be misused. Some of you will be surprised.
Here’s the link.

Since I received that rejection letter back in 1997, I’ve been fortunate to publish a lot of stories, columns, reviews and a novel, and to each of these, I owe that King of Prussian editor a small piece of credit. You never know when good advice is going to come your way, so be open to it, or your work will never find it’s place in the Hall of the Literary King at the Temple at the End of the World–or for that matter, published at all.

Now take a look at the title of this article. See anything interesting?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.