Pronoun Antecedent

Hello again amigos!

In today’s blog, I want to talk about Antecedents in writing, since this is something I struggled a little bit growing up and I wanted to help any who are having the same problem as well. So let us begin!

Antecedent is something that was mentioned previously. For example, a person or event.

To show what I am talking about, let me talk about an example. There was one time when I was in grade school when I was reading a paper that someone wanted me to proof-read for them. As I was reading I saw something that didn’t make sense with the writing. It went along the lines of, “The kid stood tall and delivered the speech to the classroom.” Instead of the world “the” before speech, my friend could’ve added “he” or “she” instead of “the”. The reason being is because “he” or “she” is the pronoun that refers back to the antecedent, which was the kid.

Another example is when I was in elementary school. I remember when I was writing a short paper for my 5th grade class and I was so into what I was writing. At the time, I was so into writing stories based on video games. Now, the common mistake I would do when I was writing, was I would talk about a character that is a male, but in my head I am thinking of other character that is female and I would write something like this, “Bob looks over the hill, sees the ocean full of ships. She then walks over to Bob and watches as well” See the mistake? Who is she? Now I could’ve added a sentence before that like, “Bob looks over the hill, sees the ocean full of ships. He then turns to look at Mary. She then walks over to Bob and watches as well.” Now that sounds a whole lot better right? The pronouns are “he” and “she” and Bob and Mary are the antecedent.

I hope with the two examples I gave helped understand what pronoun antecedents are! I speak from experience that this was no easy case when I was a kid.