Please help and grade my essay!

Wood5440
Mon, 11 Jun 2012 20:38:27 +0000

keunglh,

Pronoun reference problems occur when it is unclear to which noun a pronoun refers, or in situations when there is a pronoun used and there is no noun to which it can refer. Generally, the rule is that a pronoun refers back to the last noun mentioned. There are cases when the last noun is obviously not the one to which the pronoun refers, so one looks for the last noun that can serve the same function in the structure of the sentence.

For example: Mark and John crept quietly through the doorway into the house. “Be careful,” he warned…To whom does the pronoun ‘he’ refer? Mark? John? It could be either. But certainly not ‘doorway’ or ‘house’, even though they are the closest nouns to the pronoun.
On the other hand : Mark watched John creep through the doorway. “Be careful,” he warned… Here the focus is on Mark (He is the subject of the main clause), so ‘he’ would be assumed to refer to Mark.
While: Mark watched John creep through the doorway. John turned to look back. “Be careful,” he warned… Here the focus starts on Mark and then shifts to John. This is ambiguous. The default assumption is that ‘he’ refers to John. But perhaps not. The writer is at fault for not being more clear.

I don’t know where you are living now, but it looks like you have a year to work on tuning your ear to English syntax and idiom. SAT readers are trained to grade what is on the paper before them. They may know that you are not a native English speaker, but they aren’t allowed to take that into consideration when grading the essay.