Consistent use of the pronoun ‘it’
You’ve all said something like ‘It is raining outside’ at one time or another. Have you ever thought about what the ‘it’ is or represents? Well, in this case the pronoun doesn’t represent anything. This is just an example of how idiomatic the English language can be. ‘Idiomatic’ means that something is peculiar to a certain language and only occurs in that language.
There are other ways you can use the pronoun ‘it’; for instance, ‘John hit the ball causing it to fly through the air’. This is OK. You get some problems though when you have all the information in one sentence, like this:
Even though it was raining, John managed to hit the ball, causing it to fly through the air.
Although we can probably work out that the first ‘it’ doesn’t refer to anything and that the second ‘it’ refers to the ball, writing sentences like this can cause confusion. It’s better to rewrite the sentence so that there’s only one ‘it’ or to split the sentence into two:
Despite the rain, John managed to hit the ball, causing it to fly through the air.
OR
Even though it was raining, John managed to hit the ball. The hit caused the ball to fly through the air.
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