: Re: What are the grammatical and stylistic alternatives to avoid overusing pronouns? Recently, I've developed a habit of writing he/she/him/her and overusing the character's name at the beginning of

@Welton431

Firstly, I think pronouns and character names are some of the things that often stand out less to readers than you might think - they're easy to gloss over, in the same way as the word "said" after dialogue, which usually doesn't need replacing with a different verb.

However, sentence variety is important. It's possible that the problem you're seeing is too many sentences beginning with pronouns, rather than too many pronouns. One way to address this might be to rearrange the order of some of your sentences. For example, you could change the sentence beginning "He began to remove" to something like


Removing his jacket, he wrapped it around the little girl.


Now you don't have "he" at the start - but be careful, because any sentence pattern can become repetitive if overused.

Finally, the more pressing issue for me in this passage is that I'm a bit confused about what's going on. Is "I" the same person as "Pandora"? [Note: this related to an earlier version of the question - it is now clear that "I" is Pandora's thoughts]. I'm assuming so, and that the rest of the passage is about the man and the little girl that Pandora is watching (although in the last paragraph we seem to be in the little girl's perspective, which was a bit too abrupt a change in viewpoint for my liking). To help catch these issues, you could arrange with a friend to read and edit each other's writing. - but make sure it's someone whose writing skills you trust!

In that case, you could also make use of Acid Kritana's suggestion to replace some pronouns with nouns or noun phrases - you can get away with saying "the man" and "the girl" more often when it's coming from the perspective of someone who doesn't know who they are. Just be cautious about doing this when the viewpoint character does know. For example, if Pandora recognises the man as her friend Johnny, she's not going to talk about "the man", she's going to say "Johnny" and "he", and that's not a problem at all.

Good luck!

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