Pirate Murderers

What is a pirate murderer? Is it a pirate who murders people or is it a person who murders pirates? I don't know and neither do you.

As wonderful as our language is, it leaves a lot of room for ambiguities, such as pirate murderers. However, context will usually explain the meaning of an ambiguous phrase. We know which definition is intended between the sentences, "the pirate murderers polished their peg legs" and "the pirate murderers had finally made the sea safe."

The large majority of our ambiguity, though, comes from pronouns. A sentence can have many nouns, which means a pronoun can replace a number of words. Now, according to the rules of standard written English, a pronoun refers to the last noun used before it. Unfortunately, the fact that my last sentence is understandable proves that rule to be wrong.

If I say, "Chris saw Jenny eat his fries", we understand that "he" refers to Chris because Chris is the only noun that can use a masculine pronoun. But what if we have the sentence, "Chris saw Steven eat his fries"? Now we have two very different possibilities and an even chance of a person thinking one version or the other.

Now, with more context, we can still figure out what the intended meaning was. But the problem is that when we read that sentence, we will either be confused and try to figure out which meaning is intended or we will make an assumption, which has a 50/50 chance of being wrong and confusing us. Sure, we'll figure it out, but there will likely be a span of time where we are removed from the story and have to act as detectives. That is the exact opposite of what we want to do.

The best way to avoid ambiguity is to use simple sentences. Create a sentence where it is impossible for a pronoun to refer to more than one thing. Or, you could even just not use pronouns at all. Using the above example, you can either say, "Chris saw Steven eating fries", which implies that the fries belong to Steven, or you can say Chris saw Steven stealing fries", which implies that the fries are someone else's. Better yet, you could say, "Steven was eating Chris's fries and Chris saw it." Now all of the original ideas are present and are clearly said with no risk of ambiguity.

It sounds like a chore to do this stuff. It's a lot more technical than creating a universe and exploring it. However, this is part of the editing process and is necessary. If your audience doesn't understand what you're saying, you need to say something different.