Why Doesn't My Reader Know What "It" or "This" Is Pointing To? (Vague Pronoun Reference)

You know the mark. A teacher circles this in your essay and scrawls "unclear?" in the margin — or a colleague replies to your Friday email with "sorry, what do you mean by it?" — and both times you feel the same small flare of indignation. But I know what I meant. Of course you do. You were sitting inside your own head when you wrote it. Your reader wasn't.

That's the whole problem in one line. A pronoun like it, this, that, they or these is a stand-in — a little word you send out to point back at something you've already named. When it points cleanly at one thing, your reader glides along and never notices. When it points at a whole muddle of ideas, or at two things at once, or at nothing solid at all, your reader has to stop and guess — and guessing is exhausting. Do it often enough and they quietly stop trusting your writing.

Here's the good news: this is one of the cheapest fixes in the whole craft. You don't need a rule book. You need one practical test — you can run it with your actual finger — and two reliable repairs. Let's clear it up.

Before you read on, here's where we're heading. By the end of this article, you'll be able to: - Spot when it, this, that, these or they has gone fuzzy. - Run the pointing test on your own sentences in seconds. - Fix a vague pronoun two ways — name the noun, or reshape the sentence. - Know when "vague" is a genuine problem and when it's just casual speech doing its job.

Beginner (Foundation): the pointing test

Here's the thing — a pronoun only earns its keep if the reader can tell, instantly, which noun it's replacing. That noun has a proper name in grammar: the antecedent (roughly, "the thing that came before"). You don't have to memorise the term. You just have to be able to find the thing.

And that's exactly what the pointing test does.

Read your sentence. Put one finger on the pronoun — it, this, they, whatever it is. Now put your other finger on the one word or short phrase it's meant to stand in for, sitting in the same sentence or the one just before. Can you touch both, cleanly? If yes, you're fine. If your finger wanders across half the sentence, lands on two nouns at once, or finds nothing nameable at all — that's your vague pronoun, caught in the act.

Let's try it on the kind of sentence that gets the red circle:

• Vague: Maya put her homework in her bag, and then she lost it. — Lost the homework? The bag? Point, and your finger hovers.
• Clear: Maya put her homework in her bag, and then she lost the bag.

Or one from adult life:

• Vague: I spoke to the landlord about the boiler and the damp, and it still hasn't been fixed. — The boiler? The damp? Both as a package? You've left your landlord three readings, and they'll pick the cheapest.
• Clear: I spoke to the landlord about the boiler and the damp, and the boiler still hasn't been fixed.

Once you've spotted the wobble, the repair almost writes itself. You've really only got two moves.

1. Name the thing. Swap the vague pronoun for the exact word — the bag, the boiler, the decision. Blunt, maybe, but honest.

2. Restructure. Rebuild the sentence so the idea sits as the subject and no ghost pronoun is needed at all — Scraping the ice off the windscreen took forever, rather than We scraped the ice off the windscreen. This took forever.

That's it. You're not renaming every pronoun you own — most of them are pointing perfectly well. You're only after the handful that refuse to point.

Common Mistake: Thinking "well, I know what this means, so it's fine." If you wrote the sentence, your brain fills the gap automatically — every time, without asking you. To test it honestly, you have to read it as a stranger would. That's what the pointing test forces you to do.

Quick recap: - A pronoun must point back at one clear noun — its antecedent. - Run the pointing test: one finger on the pronoun, one on its exact stand-in. - If you can't land cleanly on a single word or phrase, it's vague. - Fix it by naming the noun, or by reshaping the sentence so no pronoun is needed.

Intermediate (Development): where these hide

Once the pointing test is in your pocket, you start seeing the same four traps everywhere — in a rushed homework paragraph and in the email you fire off at 4:55 on a Friday alike. Learn the patterns and you'll catch them faster.

Trap 1 — this or that pointing at a whole idea. You finish a chunk of explanation and reach for This shows… or This is why…, and your reader is left to invent what this bundles up.

• Vague: Costs rose twelve per cent and two suppliers dropped out. This puts the launch at risk.
• Clear: Costs rose twelve per cent and two suppliers dropped out. Those combined pressures put the launch at risk.

The trick here is small and reliable — when a sentence opens with This… or That…, try dropping a noun straight after it: this ban, this decision, this delay, that behaviour. It sharpens the meaning on the spot.

Trap 2 — two people of the same kind, one pronoun. This one snags stories and work emails equally.

• Vague: I emailed the hiring manager after speaking to the recruiter, and she seemed keen. — Who seemed keen?
• Clear: After speaking to the recruiter, I emailed the hiring manager, who seemed keen.

Yes, repeating a name can feel a touch blunt — but clarity is far more professional (and far more readable) than elegant confusion.

Trap 3 — two its fighting over one sentence. Whenever a single line carries two its, treat it as a warning light.

• Vague: I put the cake on the table and then moved it because it was wobbly. — Which one's wobbly?
• Clear: I put the cake on the table and then moved the cake because the table was wobbly.

Trap 4 — the empty they. A they with no named group just behind it is pure fog.

• Vague: At my school, they say phones aren't allowed in lessons. / They've changed the expense policy again.
• Clear: The school rules say phones aren't allowed in lessons. / Finance has changed the expense policy again.

Pro-Tip: When you've finished a draft, do a "pronoun pass" — skim it looking only for this, that, it, they, these, those, ignoring everything else. Run the pointing test on each hit. Sixty seconds of this catches most of the wobbles, and it's one of the highest-value edits going.

For the full machinery of how a pronoun locks onto its owner, head home to the antecedents material in Pillar 5; for how sentences hand meaning forward without seams, see Pillar 3 on cohesion. This clinic is the quick diagnosis — those pillars are the textbook.

Quick recap: - This/that pointing at a whole idea is the number-one wobble — add a noun (this ban, this delay) or restructure. - Two same-type people plus one he/she/they means ambiguity — name who did what. - Two its in one sentence is a warning light. - An empty they nearly always wants a real subject — the rules, Finance, a named person.

Advanced (Mastery): nuance, register and the honest exceptions

At this level you're not just swatting howlers — you're deciding how much pointing work it's fair to ask your reader to do, and when a "vague" pronoun is actually doing exactly what you want.

First, the exceptions that aren't errors. There's a kind of it that looks suspect but isn't — the so-called dummy it, as in It is raining or It seems the meeting has moved. That it doesn't stand in for any noun; it's just scaffolding holding the sentence up. Don't run the pointing test on the weather — there's nothing to point to, and nothing to fix. (More on this under sentence structure in Pillar 3.)

Second, this can point at a whole idea on purpose — and point well — if you anchor it with a noun.

• The pilot scheme cut waiting times by twenty per cent and lifted satisfaction. This success suggests we should roll it out.

Here this success wraps the previous two clauses into one tidy parcel. That's not vague — that's cohesion, doing real work. Strip the noun and you'd make the reader do a little extra lifting; add it, and the join is seamless.

On the "nearest noun" myth. People assume a pronoun safely attaches to the closest noun before it. Readers don't work that way — they grab the most plausible match for the verb and the sense of the line, not simply the nearest one. When two matches are equally plausible, both stall, and your carefully calm sentence suddenly reads as slippery. So don't trust proximity; trust the pointing test.

On register — and calling things honestly. Everyday speech runs on vague pointers. This is ridiculous. They say it's closing. That was so much fun. None of that is broken English — it's casual register, and your face, your tone and the shared moment carry the meaning. The same line dropped into a GCSE essay [US: a graded essay], a board paper or a disciplinary letter starts to look like slack thinking, because now the reader is somewhere else, later, with none of that context. Some style guides and mark schemes ban free-standing this by name — not because the grammar police will come for you, but because formal writing prizes explicit glue.

Think of it like a speed limit. On an empty motorway [US: highway] at midnight you can bend it a little; you don't do it outside a school at half three. Texts, chat and dialogue are the empty road — CVs [US: résumés], reports, essays and legal letters are the school zone. Err toward over-clarity there, because the further your writing travels from the moment you wrote it, the less chance you'll be in the room to explain what this meant.

One last professional instinct — resist the schoolroom myth that you must never repeat a word. Plenty of writers stuff this, that and it everywhere purely to avoid saying "the poem" twice, and the result goes wobbly. Honestly? Clear repetition beats clever confusion every time. A tired examiner won't mind seeing "the report" three times in a paragraph if it means they never have to reread a line.

Pro-Tip: In anything with several people on stage — a multi-character story, a group-update email — open with a tiny cast list when the stakes are high (Tara = client, Leo = delivery, me = ops). Then every later she or he has a named slot to fall into. It's deeply unfashionable and extremely effective.

Common Mistake: Reaching for a pronoun to sound less repetitive, and blurring your meaning in the trade. Good style is clear first and varied second — never the other way round.

Quick recap: - Dummy it (It is raining) is structural, not a reference problem — leave it alone. - This can summarise a whole idea if you pair it with a noun (this success, this pattern). - "Nearest noun" is a false safety net — sense and structure decide, so trust the test. - The more formal and long-lived the writing, the tighter your pronouns must be. - Clear repetition beats clever confusion. - Final self-check: name each pronoun's antecedent in three words or fewer. If you can't, rewrite.

UK vs US Note

There's no genuine UK/US split here — the pointing problem, and its fixes, work identically on both sides of the Atlantic. Only the spelling of words nearby may toggle: colour [US: color], behaviour [US: behavior], organise [US: organize], favourite [US: favorite]. None of that changes how it and this behave. And where someone insists casual this or they say… is an "error," name it honestly: that's register, not a national divide — formal writing everywhere dislikes a free-floating this, and informal writing everywhere uses it happily.

Key Takeaways

• A pronoun is vague when your reader can't tell exactly what it stands in for.
• Use the pointing test: one finger on the pronoun, one on the single clear word or phrase before it. If you can't point cleanly, fix it.
• Two fixes cover almost everything — name the noun (this delay, the boiler) or restructure so no pronoun is needed.
• The usual culprits: this/that for a whole idea, two people sharing one he/she/they, two its in a line, and the empty they.
• Dummy it (It is raining) isn't vague — don't panic-edit the weather.
• Be stricter in essays, reports and applications than in texts and chat — the less context your reader has, the clearer your pronouns must be.

Check Your Understanding

1. Run the pointing test: Leo dropped the water bottle on the laptop and it broke. What's wrong, and how would you fix it?

2. Rewrite so this is clear: Our team raised £500 for charity. This was great.

3. Why is At our school they ban hoodies in lessons considered vague in an essay — and how would you fix it?

4. Is It snowed all night a vague-pronoun problem? Explain.

5. True or false: the nearest noun before a pronoun is always the safe antecedent.

Related articles from our library (Pillar 10 links)

• Pronoun–Antecedent Agreement Clinic — matching each pronoun with the right noun.
• Pronoun Case Clinic — sorting out I/me, she/her, they/them (a different problem entirely — that's about pronoun form, not what it points to).
• Pillar 5: Pronouns and Antecedents — the full "why" behind how pronouns refer back.
• Pillar 3: Cohesion and Flow — how sentences link cleanly so your reader never gets lost.