I used to have a friend – “Mary” – who had difficulty with the pronoun that. Here’s an example:

Mary: An antiques store just opened on Central Avenue.
Me: That would be a fun place to visit.
Mary: Visit what?

“Mary” was having some anxiety and depression issues back then, and I think they were interfering with her concentration. (It probably happens to many of us from time to time.)  The connection between language and mental health would make an interesting topic. But I want to go down a different road today and take a look at what Mary’s brain was not doing.

Under normal circumstances, our minds hang on to a word or phrase even after the sounds have faded away. Some hidden part of our mental equipment is thinking, “The person I’m talking to may refer to the antiques store again [or whatever the topic is], so I’m going to hold on to that idea.” (A grammarian would say that we’re connecting a pronoun with its antecedent.)

It’s like a juggler who has three balls – two that he’s getting ready to toss, and one that’s up in the air.

That kind of thinking process is flying under our mental radar all the time. Amazing!

I’m going to give two more examples, and then I want to make a connection to writing.

Take a look at this incomplete sentence:

I was planning to wash the car today, but it…

No problem, right? But watch what happens when I finish the example:

I was planning to wash the car today, but it started raining.

For just an instant, your brain pictured the car [it] raining. Even though you may not have been conscious of that blip, your brain noticed it and paused for a milli-second to make a correction.

Now let’s try one more example. Here’s something my husband used to say all the time:

Driving home from work, the radio had an interesting report about the Supreme Court.

If you’re an English teacher, you spotted the dangling modifier right away (the radio didn’t drive home!). But most people wouldn’t experience a blip there. Somehow our brains smoothly translate “driving home” into “While I was driving home.” We don’t picture a radio operating a car (at least I never did, and I heard that sentence many times over the years).

Effective editing requires going back over everything we’ve written (ideally with feedback from someone else) to find all these blips. Not all of them will require corrections – but some will.

Someone whose brain has to keep backtracking may simply give up on your essay, report, or book. We don’t want that to happen, do we?

(Somewhere, far back in my brain, I can hear Mary’s voice asking, “Don’t want what to happen?”)