a hard error to spot

I'm about halfway through George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire pentalogy: I'm currently in the middle of A Storm of Swords, having slogged through A Game of Thrones and then skipped lightly through A Clash of Kings.

Martin's an impressive storyteller insofar as he's able to juggle enormous amounts of fictional trivia about the world he's created. His ability to flesh out characters seems to vary, depending on how well he likes the character he's describing, but he's generally not too bad with characterization. As a writer to be judged on technical merits, however, Martin often falls prey to rookie-level errors—his worst offense, by far, being the infamous comma splice, which is when you use a comma, instead of a semicolon, to separate two independent clauses. I've stopped trying to count the number of comma splices I've encountered in Martin's work, and am doing my best just to grit my teeth and ignore them in favor of being caught up in the flow of the story. ASOIAF contains other types of errors as well: there's the occasional typo (should we blame the copy editor for not catching those?), and then there are errors like the following one, which is hard to spot even for veteran editors:

On the morning her new gown was to be ready, the serving girls filled Sansa's tub with steaming hot water and scrubbed her head to toe until she glowed pink.

Did you spot the error? There may in fact be two or more, but if there are two or more, they're all the same type of error, produced by the same cause.

Give up? Here's a hint: antecedents. Did that help? No? Let's try another approach, then.

Look at the following erroneous sentence. The error in the example below is the same as the one(s) in Martin's sentence, so watch this carefully:

In Carl Sagan's book, he writes about the nature of science and the dangers of pseudoscience.

Note the pronoun he. You know that pronouns replace or refer to or represent some noun, which is called the antecedent (i.e., the thing that comes before, hence the ante). So now ask yourself: to what noun does he, in the above sentence, refer? If your answer is, "It refers to the proper noun Carl Sagan," then I'm afraid you're wrong. Why? Because, Dear Reader, in the above sentence, the possessive locution Carl Sagan's is functioning as a possessive adjective modifying the noun book. Ergo: the pronoun he has no antecedent! The phrase Carl Sagan's exists, but not the proper noun Carl Sagan.

Finding the above type of error is hard, but luckily, correcting it is easy:

In his book, Carl Sagan writes about the nature of science and the dangers of pseudoscience.

Before we go back to GRR Martin's erroneous sentence, let's meditate a moment on possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives. Some slapdash guides, both online and on paper, refer to words like his exclusively as possessive pronouns, but such words are often possessive adjectives. Learn to tell the difference; it's not that hard. Just keep in mind that an adjective modifies a noun, and you're good to go.

Jake washed his car. (his = possessive adjective modifying car)

That car was his. (his = possessive pronoun referring to That car)

Now armed with this new knowledge, you can go back to Martin's sentence and, I hope, easily spot the problem(s):

On the morning her new gown was to be ready, the serving girls filled Sansa's tub with steaming hot water and scrubbed her head to toe until she glowed pink.

While I hesitate to read a great writer's mind, I suspect that Mr. Martin had intended that possessive and those pronouns to refer to the proper noun Sansa. The problem, of course, is that Sansa doesn't exist in this sentence: there is only the possessive adjective Sansa's. So I'm sorry, Mr. Martin, but that one sentence contains three errors in it, all caused by the same problem: the lack of a proper antecedent.

Those with eyes to read, let them read.


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