Pronouns: Who Exactly Is "IT"?

It's 9:40 at night. You finished work two hours ago, ate something standing up, and now you're staring at a Sentence Correction question with five answer choices that look almost exactly alike. You read them all twice. Two of them "sound fine." You pick the one that sounds a little more fine. You get it wrong.

I'll bet the whole question hinged on a word with two letters in it.

Here's my blunt verdict: most people don't lose Sentence Correction points to fancy grammar. They lose them to tiny words they never stop to question. The tiniest and most dangerous of them all is IT. Learn to ask one question, "who exactly is it?", and a whole family of wrong answers starts jumping off the page.

First, what we're dealing with

The Executive Assessment has three 30-minute sections: Integrated Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning. The Verbal section gives you 14 questions, a mix of Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. Each section is scored 0 to 20, and all three count the SAME toward your total. You can see the full breakdown on GMAC's assessment structure page. So Verbal is not the section you coast through. It's a full third of your score.

A Sentence Correction question gives you a sentence with part of it underlined. Below it are five versions of that underlined part. Choice A always repeats the original. Your job is to pick the version that is grammatically correct AND says clearly what the writer meant.

A pronoun is a short word that stands in for a noun: it, its, they, them, their, which. The noun it stands in for is called the antecedent. In "The firm raised its prices," the antecedent of "its" is "the firm." Simple. Until it isn't.

The three questions to ask about EVERY pronoun

1. Who is it? Point to the exact noun on the page. Not "the general idea." A noun you can put your finger on.
2. Is there only ONE noun it could be? If two nouns could fit, the sentence is unclear. Unclear is wrong.
3. Does the number match? One thing takes it and its. More than one thing takes they, them and their.

Three questions. You do NOT need to memorize a grammar textbook. You need to stop treating pronouns like filler.

The office habit that will cost you

Here's where your career works against you. At work, you say things like "The client called and they want the deck by Friday." Everyone knows what you mean. Nobody in a meeting has ever stopped you to say the client is singular. But on this test, a company, a team, a board or a foundation is ONE thing. It is IT. Spoken English lets "they" slide. The test does not.

That's exactly why "sounds right" is NOT a grammar rule. Your ear has been trained by years of meetings and emails. On this question type, your ear is a liar.

The quieter killer: the pronoun with two homes

Number errors are the loud ones. The quiet ones are pronouns that could point to two different nouns. Stop and think about this for a second: if YOU can't tell who "it" is, why would you assume the test writer meant for that to be fine?

This habit of asking "what does this point to?" pays off outside Sentence Correction too. When a passage says "this view" or "it" in the middle of a paragraph, the same question keeps you oriented, which is a big part of why Reading Comprehension is a MAP problem.

5 pronoun mistakes I watch people make every week

1. Reading pronouns like filler. Your eyes slide right over "it" because it's tiny. INSTEAD: In the underlined part and in every choice, find every pronoun on purpose. Treat each one as a suspect until it proves where it points.
2. Trusting your ear. "The company said they..." sounds normal because you've heard it a thousand times. INSTEAD: On your pad, write the pronoun, an arrow, and the noun it points to, plus S for singular or P for plural. If the letters don't match, the choice is dead.
3. Doing it in your head. You THINK you tracked all three pronouns. You tracked two. INSTEAD: Write it down. It takes seconds, and it's the difference between a guess and a decision.
4. Fixing one pronoun and stopping. That's exactly how choice C in the second example catches people. INSTEAD: Check EVERY pronoun in a choice before you fall in love with it.
5. Re-reading all five choices top to bottom, three times. That's not care. That's a pacing problem in disguise. INSTEAD: Look for where the choices split: its versus their, it versus a real noun. Then cut them in groups, like crossing off A and D together in the first example.

Notice something? None of these mistakes is about being bad at grammar. They're about not looking. That's good news, because looking is trainable.

Your challenge for tonight

Pull 10 Sentence Correction questions you've already done. Do NOT answer them again. Instead, circle every pronoun in every answer choice. Draw the arrow to its noun. Write S or P. Then count how many of the wrong answers die on a pronoun alone.

I'll bet that number is BIGGER than you think. Stop reading and go find out.