Post History
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 hai...
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-14T20:45:28Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46589 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T12:26:42Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46589 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
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?
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-07-13T12:31:13Z (almost 5 years ago)
Original score: 8