This Rule I Learned and Then Unlearned

Last week, as I was making final revisions to an article for an edited volume, I worked through all the very helpful comments from one of the volume editors in the margins of the document. I accepted all the suggested emendations until I got to this sentence:

If students can also look at dictionaries for world varieties (e.g., Cassidy and Le Page; Muller, Wright, and Silva), this can enrich discussions of the role dictionaries continue to play in standardizing — and legitimizing — new varieties of English, much like Noah Webster’s dictionary strove to do for American English in the nineteenth century.

My colleague editing the volume asked whether it would work to add the noun exploration after this: “… this exploration can enrich discussions … ” I knew exactly what he was after: unattended this. In other words, the pronoun this standing alone to refer back to a preceding object, concept, situation, or other antecedent. And I completely empathized.

Somewhere in my schooling it was drummed into me that “good writers” do not leave the word this unattended, and I never questioned this assertion. As a writer, I would always add a noun to clarify what I was referring back to (so that this becomes a determiner modifying that noun), even when sometimes that was hard: Was I referring to an idea or a proposal or a hypothesis or a conjecture or a situation in which there are several intersecting factors, etc.?^* And as a teacher, I would circle every unattended this I came across, sometimes suggesting a possible noun, just as this editor had done.

Then in 2009, when I was teaching an upper-level grammar course that I called “Grammar Boot Camp,” the students and I read an article called “Attended and Unattended ‘This’ in Academic Writing: A Long and Unfinished Story” by John M. Swales. It forever changed me as a writer and editor.

Swales describes a corpus-based study of academic prose based on Hyland’s corpus of 240 published articles. He shows that anaphoric this is very frequent in academic prose, and about half of those this’s occur in clause-subject position (as mine does in the sentence in question). Of these subject-position this’s, about one third are “unattended.” In other words, published writers are regularly using unattended this, and their editors are letting it through.

Once you lift the prohibition on unattended this — which I have now done as a writer, editor, and teacher — you can ask a more nuanced question about any given instance: Is it clear from context what the writer is referring back to with the this? In fact, this is where many standard usage guides now land, including Bryan Garner’s fourth edition of his usage guide, Garner’s Modern English Usage.^** It’s possible that Strunk and White’s lack of a definitive “OK” in Elements of Style is part of what lingers; its fourth edition states:

The pronoun this, referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, can’t always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise statement.

Very true. What Strunk and White arguably imply but fail to say is that when this can carry the load all by itself and the antecedent is clear, no noun need be added.

Now it is up to you, Lingua Franca readers, to determine whether my unattended this can carry the load. The editor of the article was willing to give it to me, but opinions may differ on this [question].

_______

^* In fact, I spent some time with the first sentence in this paragraph trying to decide whether I wanted to call what was drummed into me an assertion, fact, proposition, or something else.

^** The editor of Lingua Franca let through the unattended this at the beginning of this sentence.