Hearing the sentence in your head
From Atul Gawande's op-ed piece "Let's Talk About Sex" in the
NYT, 5/19/07, p. A25:
Reducing unintended pregnancy is the
key -- half of pregnancies are unintended, and 4 in 10 of them end in
abortion.
The first reading I got was that 4 in 10 pregnancies end in
abortion. But whoa, that can't be right; surely the abortion rate
isn't that high. Gawande must have intended to say that 4 of 10
UNINTENDED
pregnancies (2 in 10 of all pregnancies) end in abortion.
I read the sentence in my head with unaccented
them, the usual prosody for
anaphoric pronouns; with that accenting, the referent of
them is pregnancies,
pregnancies being the nearest
available antecedent NP, an NP moreover in a phrase (
of pregnancies) parallel to the
phrase (
of them) that
them is in. Gawande
presumably heard it in
HIS head with accented
them, the accent here signaling
that the usual referent-finding procedures don't apply. (The
accented
HIS in my last sentence illustrates a
different use of accent: to point up a contrast, his head vs. my head.)
Gawande could have made things clear -- by putting
them in small caps or italics, to
indicate accent, or by choosing
those
or
these, which here would
convey the introduction of a new discourse referent, one the reader has
to identify from the context: unintended pregnancies. Why didn't
he make things clear?
Because he heard the sentence in his head and didn't realize that he'd
have to mark the accent for the reader (or choose a different anaphor).
One of the hardest tasks in writing is taking the viewpoint of your
audience, reading your own stuff the way your readers are likely to;
putting the sentences in your head down on paper isn't enough.
Sometimes even excellent, practiced writers get it wrong.
[Added 5/22/07. First, a clarification: Gawande was reporting on abortions in the U.S. specifically, not around the world. The 20% (rather than 40%) figure is consistent with a report, passed on to me by Alexa Mater, in the latest
Economist: "In the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain and most of the rest of western Europe, around 15-25% of pregnancies are terminated." Even better, Ray Girvan has found what was probably the source for Gawande's statistics, in a Guttmacher Institute
report: "Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion" (note
these rather than
them). Finally, Andy Hollandbeck points out that the anaphora error might be an editor's, rather than Gawande's.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 20, 2007 03:45 PM