It or this?

Photo: Texas A&M IT

A problem that often crops up for my ESL students is the difficulty they have in deciding when to use it and when to use this to refer back in a piece of writing to what has gone before.

This is an interesting problem. As a native speaker and an ESL instructor, I have to find ways to explain this. The first of these is the grammatical rule: the word it is allowed only a single word as an antecedent. The word this that appears at the beginning of this paragraph refers back to the fact that the students have difficulty in deciding; thus, since the word it cannot have a phrase or clause as antecedent, we must use this rather than it.

However, it is quite possible that this rule, like so many rules in English, does not always hold. Wait! The word it in the previous sentence refers to the fact that it is possible..., so why not change it to this?

The answer is that in addition to knowing the rule about antecedents, we must take idiomatic phrases into consideration.  The previous paragraph uses the common expression "It is possible that" and that expression always begins with it. In the same way, we would say, It is strange that...It is interesting that...and so on.

Also, in the above examples, this refers not back, but forward in the text. Is this as clear as mud? Or is it still confusing? Did you notice that the last it referred back to the word this in the previous sentence?

I have to stop trying to explain this. It's driving me crazy. (Same pattern as previous paragraph.)

Picture: This on Vimeo