Grimmer Grammar: Antecedents
by Brian K. Henry (abstractplane on Wattpad)
Wattpadders love reading horror stories, mysteries and thrillers, but not too many name Grammar books as favorite genre. This may be because most grammar books have lackluster plots. Or that they simply aren’t scary and macabre enough.
That’s why we need Grimmer Grammar! Grammar filled with grim and twisted examples to excite the attention of today’s reader.
In this edition of Grimmer Grammar, we’ll tackle antecedents. This is a great place to start because the word antecedent already sounds like a dead female relative.
In reality, an antecedent is a noun in a sentence that is later referred to by a pronoun. For example:
Cue Ball Nelson was a killer with long fingernails who terrorized the waterfront with his bug-eyes and pale, eerie face.
In this extremely scary sentence, ‘who’ is the pronoun that refers back to the antecedent Cue Ball Nelson.
The problems with antecedents begin when you thrown in a lot of pronouns. If the reader can’t tell which antecedent is referred to, you may get one annoyed potential fan. For example:
Cue Ball and Squirrelly struggled on the wharf as he slashed a knife across his exposed, tattooed stomach and the blood gushed out.
In this sentence, we don’t know if Cue Ball is slicing Squirrelly, if Squirrelly is slicing Cue Ball, or even if Cue Ball or Squirrelly is slicing himself! Or there could even be another mysterious he or two involved to make things even more confusing.
We can fix this by writing:
Cue Ball and Squirrelly struggled on the wharf as the killer slashed a knife across his victim’s exposed, tattooed stomach and the blood gushed out.
Since we’ve already told the reader that Cue Ball is a killer, it’s now pretty clear what’s going on in the sentence.
You also need to make sure you keep your pronouns in agreement when dealing with antecedents. For example:
Cue Ball followed two vivacious girls down a dark alley, salivating with anticipation as she ran into a dead end.
In this sentence, ‘two girls’ is the antecedent for ‘she’, but she needs to be plural to agree with ‘two girls’. So we can change ‘she’ to ‘they’ and we have a simple fix. Lucky Cue Ball!
So there you have it, a grim look at antecedents. Just like you’d look back to see if Cue Ball’s on your tail in a dark alley, be sure to look back at the beginning of sentences and paragraphs to make sure your antecedents are in order.
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