Edit and proofread your draft.
Several errors occur often in essays that propose solutions: ambiguous use of this and that, and sentences that lack an agent. The following guidelines will help you check your essay for these common errors.
Avoiding Ambiguous Use of This and That
A Note on Grammar and Spelling Checkers
These tools can be helpful, but do not rely on them exclusively to catch errors in your text: Spelling checkers cannot catch misspellings that are themselves words, such as to for too. Grammar checkers miss some problems, sometimes give faulty advice for fixing problems, and can flag correct items as wrong. Use these tools as a second line of defense after your own (and, ideally, another reader’s) proofreading and editing efforts.
The Problem Because you must frequently refer to the problem and the solution in a proposal, you will often use pronouns to avoid the monotony or wordiness of repeatedly referring to them by name. Using this and that vaguely to refer to other words or ideas, however, can confuse readers.
The Correction Add a specific noun after this or that. For example, in his essay in this chapter, Patrick O’Malley writes:
Furthermore, professors could help students prepare for midterm and final exams by providing sets of questions from which the exam questions will be selected. This solution would have the advantage of reducing students’ anxiety about learning every fact in the textbook. (par. 13)
O’Malley avoids an ambiguous this in the second sentence by adding the noun solution. (He might just as well have used preparation or action or approach.) Here’s another example:
Revising Sentences That Lack an Agent
The Problem A writer proposing a solution to a problem usually needs to indicate who should take action to solve it. Those who are in a position to take action are called “agents.” Look, for example, at this sentence from Patrick O’Malley’s proposal:
To get students to complete the questions in a timely way, professors would have to collect and check the answers. (par. 12)
In this sentence, professors are the agents. They have the authority to assign and collect study questions, and they would need to take this action in order for this solution to be successfully implemented.
Had O’Malley instead written “the answers would have to be collected and checked,” the sentence would lack an agent. Failing to name an agent would have made his argument less convincing, because it would have left unclear one of the key parts of any proposal: who is going to take action.
The Correction When you revise your work, ask yourself who or what performed the action in any given sentence. If there’s no clear answer, rewrite the sentence to give it an agent. Watch in particular for forms of the verb to be (the ball was dropped, exams should be given, etc.), which often signal agentless sentences.
Note: Sometimes, however, agentless sentences are appropriate, as when the agent is clear from the context, unknown, or less important than the person or thing acted upon.