need clarification on writing MC question

Test Preparation
1

<p><em>in the long run</em>, <em>having</em> a president and a governor of opposing parties may actually help, <em>not hinder</em> <em>his</em> ability to succeed. </p>

<p>The answer is <em>his</em>. So can someone, like flip haha, clear this question:</p>

<p>so if you see a lone sentence on an SAT error ID or fixing sentence with ONLY a pronoun, then is that a wrong cause theres no antecedent? but if it indicates who it is, but pronoun is in 2 sentences, like "Alice is good. She is smart" then its OK?</p>

2

<p>The reason that the "his" is wrong is because the antecedent is unclear. "His" could be referring to either the president or the governor.</p>

3

<p>Yes, the pronoun is ambiguous. A sentence on the SAT including a pronoun that has an unclear antecedent will always be wrong. Ambiguity of any kind is intolerable.</p>

4

<p>yep, this is somethng that usually only appears onthe sat...u should be able to pick these up after you have practiced with a few tests.</p>

5

<p>hmm actually, when i meant ambiguous, i wasn't thinking whether He refers to the president or governor (jeez, this is the first thing sat prep books teach you..) i was thinking whether this question is wrong because <em>he</em> the context of the sentence doesnt indicate who HE is. </p>

<p>i guess what i'm trying to say is, if this sentence didn't have either the governor or the president, and just had <em>he</em>, would that be wrong? cause in the context of this sentence, from my point of view, the <em>he</em> refers to some unknown third party, independent from the pres and gov</p>

6

<p>Hmm...you bring up an interesting point. If this were in an improving paragraph question, then the sentence could possibly by OK. You should still pick the answer that clarifies it more though. But if in a regular error ID question, it is definitely incorrect.</p>

7

<p>bump it up thx</p>

<p>I'm quite sure that this would be right in a improving paragraph question, since the context of the passage will tell you who "he" is. what about improving sentences? If the sentence just has a pronoun, but no clear antecedent. its wrong?</p>

8

<p>If the sentence was like the one above, then yes, it is wrong in an Improving Sentence question. But if there is no antecedent at all, and just a pronoun, then technically it would be correct. I have never seen that happening before on the SAT though. Still, if the pronoun is ambiguous, it WILL always be incorrect.</p>