Ambiguous sentences: How to tell when they need fixing?
A story of mine has the following sentence:
Alyssa was possessed by a sudden, fierce urge to snatch the teacup out of her sister's hand and dump the contents into her perfectly arranged hair.
On further reflection, I realized this sentence is ambiguous: I never said which of the two gets the tea dumped on her head. Except, I'm not sure that the sentence really needs fixing - it wouldn't make sense for Alyssa to get mad and dump the tea on her own head. (I tried to replace the pronoun with her sister's name, but the resulting sentence just felt... clumsy.)
Is there a way I can objectively tell if an ambiguous sentence will cause confusion and needs to be fixed?
3 answers
As an observation, sentences are typically embedded in paragraphs. If there is an (potential) ambiguity, I might add a reaction sentence to the paragraph, such as, "The sister, Mary, sputtered in shock." Or screeched, yelled, threw a hay-maker, quoted an obscure Latin phrase, or anything else keeping with the assaulted sister's character.
Unless the reader is analyzing the text word by word, the flow of the material should carry the reader along so quickly that the (potential) ambiguity is disposed of before it is even recognized by the reader. If the story and the characters are good, the readers will forgive such minor vaults, if they ever notice them. My advice is to focus on delivering quality in those areas and not tie yourself in knots over subtle points of grammar. Most readers will recognize that that the story has given them pleasure. A few readers will seek to find fault; no amount of analysis, refinement, or quality will stop them from finding something. Focus on those readers who are having a good time, not those who are focused on giving the writer a bad time.
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If the object pronoun, ‘her’ in this case, doesn’t have a clear antecedent then the sentence will be ambiguous.
By convention, the object pronoun is associated with the nearest object noun. There are exceptions since this is English and rules are only suggestions for the most part.
The first occurrence of ‘her’ is potentially ambiguous since there isn’t a clear object noun to link it to. If there were more people present, and some of them were sisters then you wouldn’t whose sister it referred to.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46592. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Alyssa is upset with her sister. Assuming that this will be make even more obvious by context, I think the text is fine as it is.
You could make the sentence perfectly clear, but keep in mind that this isn't tech writing. The protagonist is angry here, and probably not thinking logically. Trying to achieve perfect clarify would probably take the soul of the writing away.
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