In this section, can you clearly see the antecedent of the pronoun, it? (in bold red) ---------------------------------------------- “How's it going, Carse?” asked Rich, straining to keep his voice calm. “Almost there.” He hunched over the starter battery, struggling to loosen the terminal nuts. Beside him, the generator’s leads dangled, waiting for the charge that would zap it to life. ------------------------------------------------ Thanks for your help.
To me, the organization of the sentence tells me that it's the leads, not the battery, that will be zapped to life. I know what you mean, but I register it as an error. Edited to add: A rephrase that feels grammatically correct could be. Beside him, the generator’s leads dangled, waiting for the charge that would allow them to zap the battery to life.
Another rephrasing that I would read as correct: Beside him the generator waited, leads dangling, for the charge that would zap it to life.
Am I the only one seeing a grammatical issue? Sure, the intent is clear, but that's not really my point. Anyone?
Another vote for generator, but...that sentence feels weird to me. The 'it' feels kind of...unowned, maybe, like it's not close enough to what it belongs to. I had to read it twice. @ChickenFreak, I think I see what you mean.
I agree with you, chicken freak. I want the antecedent to be generator, but I have written it as leads, and created a conflic. Thanks.
No, the pronoun it in this sentence refers to the generator. Lets break it down: Beside him, the generator’s leads dangled, waiting for the charge that would zap it to life. The nouns in this sentence are: generator leads charge life We can exclude "leads" because it is plural, so "it" does not apply. We can exclude "charge" because it is the subject of the clause We can exclude "life" because it is within a prepositional phrase which appears after the pronoun Therefore by process of elimination, the only noun to which that pronoun can refer is "generator". I didn't need to break it down to understand this. It was clear to me on the first read that "it" was referring to the generator. However, whether or not it is correct (or even reasonable) to register this as an error, the fact that some people did might suggest that there is at least a stylistic issue here, i.e. that the sentence might be too complex. You could simplify it to: Beside him, dangling leads waited for the charge that would zap the generator to life. This removes any possible pronoun ambiguity. It removes the specificity that the leads were dangling from the generator, but this should be obvious by virtue of the fact that they will zap it back to life.
I agree that it's fine as written - pronouns don't refer back to the nearest noun of any sort, they refer back the the closest noun that matches. Like, singular vs. plural, male vs female vs neutral, or whatever other information a pronoun may be able to contain.
I'd say 'zap' holds the ambiguity... makes me naturally think of batteries. Restart/kickstart? < that moves the meaning towards something kinetic.
I'm dumb. I kept seeing it as the generator coming back to life. But maybe that's just me. I can see that it's obviously the battery. And now that I've read it repeatedly, it's very obvious. But I had to read it more than once. Now that I've studied this, I think I see why "it" misdirects. In this phrase . . . waiting for the charge that would zap it to life. . . . "waiting" refers to "leads." It's the last noun. (PP phrases always act as adjectives.) So "it" wants to go with it. Here's an option. Lost "hunch," which is a good image . . . so that's a sad minus with this edit. Bonus is that it loses an -ing phrase, since both lines back-to-back ended with a long one, that may offset the minus. Now the two lines are dramatically different. Usually a good thing, IMO. “Almost there.” He struggled to loosen the terminal nuts. Beside him, the generator’s leads dangled, waiting for the charge that would zap the starter battery to life. So the explanation of the terminal nuts comes with the second sentence.
Come on guys, doesn't anyone here know anything about generators? They convert mechanical energy (something turns them) to electricity, that may zap something else to life, but they do not get zapped to life. There is a battery (or something) waiting somewhere to be zapped to life by the generator, when something turns it. The problem is not the pronoun and its antecedent, it is understanding what is doing what to what. Sorry, just the engineer in me speaking.
My understanding of the situation is that Carse is struggling to connect the battery to the generator (I'm assuming he's loosening the terminal nuts before attaching the generator leads to them and then tightening them up again). Once he's done that, he'll press the starter button, and the battery will provide a charge that will turn the starter motor on the generator, which will then chug into life. Only THEN will the generator be able to convert anything into electricity, and gradually charge up a battery - or provide the power that runs the emergency lighting, or whatever. I also think that the gradualness of the battery being charged precludes anything as violent as zapping being used as the verb to describe what happens to it.
I don't. I disagree, unless the target audience is specifically engineers. If the sentence implies that it is the generator being zapped back to life and only an engineer (or somebody else with prior knowledge of generators) would know otherwise, then that's a problem whether the sentence is grammatically correct or not.
It is a problem. You simply don't zap a generator back to life, and you don't need to be an engineer to know this.... anyone who works on a car or boat will know this.
Oh, I wasn't really thinking about the content at all. If we're supposed to be zapping the battery back to life, then, yeah, the antecedent's no good.
I am neither an engineer, nor work on cars, nor on boats. So I need the sentence to show that the thing which is zapped back to life is the battery, not the generator.
In that case, "it" is the battery. For clarity just say "waiting to zap the battery back to life." Sorry, didn't mean to give you a hard time, @mashers. As a general rule, when I am editing what I have written, I pay particular attention to "it" and don't use it (sic) except in dialogue, unless its (sic) meaning is crystal clear. For technical writing, part of my engineering day job, "it" is actually almost a forbidden word, because of possible misconstrusion (is that a word?)... the possibility of being misconstrued.
If I understand this correctly, he is going to a. Disconnect leads from the battery going elsewhere b. connect the leads dangling from the generator to the now-disconnected battery c. start some (non-electric) motor to turn the generator that will charge the battery Once the battery is charged, he will disconnect the generator, reconnect the battery and begin using it for whatever it is for. Now if you are starting a dead battery in a car (like a jump start), you don't need to disconnect the dead battery's load. You just connect other car's generator to the battery AND its load, and charge the battery. Once the battery has enough charge to turn its own engine over, that engine has its own charging system to keep the battery charged. No need to disconnect the battery from the dead car's system to charge it from the live car.
'Leads' is plural. 'It' is singular. Therefore the antecedent is the singular 'generator'. As others have also noted.
No. There's nothing wrong with the battery (we hope, it's the only one they've got!). He's just got to connect the battery to the generator, and then ZAP the generator to life with the (full) charge from the battery. Once the (let's assume diesel - could be petrol, or nuclear fusion, or whatever) engine of the generator is up and running, it will be able to generate electricity, which will slowly charge the battery back up. It would be a really powerful generator that could ZAP a battery back up to full charge; it will take time. (That's one of my "how the hell is that going to work in the real world" about the pressure towards electric cars. 6-8 hours to get to full charge. 200 miles range. That's around 33 miles per hour...until you add in the 3 hours it will take you at 66 mph...which works out at 22 mph! I suppose if you assume you start with a full charge, and stop for a meal anyway at half-way, you could cover 400 miles in 11 hours = 36 mph. I'd hate to have to go to Scotland in one!)
I'd love to be the person who invents a small, fast-charging battery that runs basically forever. Wow. So many things in our lives would be transformed. And I'd be rich.
@Shadowfax, you are confusing motors with generators. A motor converts electrical power to kinetic energy, a generator the reverse. They are sometimes interchangeable, a generator may be able to act as a motor by applying electricity to it instead of extracting it, causing it to rotate, but not always. C'mon guys, this is basic electricity. If you are going to write about the subject, you have to do your research. It's like you are writing a story about poker, but the rules you describe are for bridge. The problem is not the pronoun, it's that what you are describing is totally incorrect. 'nuff said, just look it up in wikipedia.
