Ambiguous pronouns

Pronouns function as placeholders for nouns. But there seems to be a difference between first and second person pronouns (I, me, you, we), third-person pronouns (he, she, they, it), and demonstrative pronouns (that, this).

It might be technically possible to speak without the use of third-person and demonstrative pronouns. They function something like constant variables in a computer program — instead of saying “she”, you could repeatedly refer to the person by name.

First-person pronouns (I, me, you, we) are referring to nouns, but the noun they are referring to is implicitly understood. The meaning of the word is dependent on context. When I say “I am learning about the use of pronouns” it doesn’t mean the same thing as when you say “I am learning about the use of pronouns”. When I say “you are very intelligent” it doesn’t mean the same as when you say “you are very intelligent”.

Pronouns and clear writing

Pronouns function as placeholders for nouns — “things”, or “referents”. Readers shouldn’t have to put in much effort to determine what thing is being referred to.

Demonstrative pronoun examples

What about the sentence: “If I had a high resolution monitor, I think that setting GDK_SCALE to 2 would be appropriate.”

It could also be written as:

“If I had a high resolution monitor, I think setting GDK_SCALE to 2 would be appropriate.” (omitting the word “that”.)

What is “that” referring to in this case? It’s referring to “setting GDK_SCALE”, which is referred to in the current sentence. The seemingly optional use of “that” in the sentence is referring to a previous sentence where I mention having removed that setting from a configuration file.

Somewhat unrelated, but removing “I think” from the sentence would make it clearer: “If I had a high-resolution monitor, setting GDK_SCALE to 2 would be appropriate.” (Don’t hedge your bets so much.) Moving the conditional part of the sentence to the end would be even better: “Setting GTK_SCALE to 2 would be appropriate if I had a high-resolution monitor.”