cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/4749799
Coming to your favorite desktop: cool interface re-designs (rounded corners! Automatic smooth light-to-dark transitions!), features (smart KRunner searches! Pinned clipboard items!) and tons of usability and accessibility improvements.
I thought “it” in this case would clearly refer to “having to go back to Windows” from the first part of the sentence.
But I am not a native English speaker, perhaps there’s a difference to the use in my language?
How would you use “it” as a reference correctly in English here?
Your use of “it” wasn’t incorrect. English allows for grammatically correct sentences that are nevertheless potentially ambiguous.
The confusion arises because “it” refers to the antecedent noun in a sentence, and nouns are typically considered the “subject” of a sentence. However, there is also a “subject” of discussion—which shifted to being the messiness of the Windows 11 UI. Thus, “it” became a vague reference.
The only “fix” is to restate the noun to which you are attempting to refer.
For example: “I put my laptop in my bag. When I went to grab my bag, I dropped it.”
Did I drop my bag or did I drop my laptop? The answer is unclear. A clearer statement would be something like: “I put my laptop in my bag. I dropped the bag containing my laptop when I attempted to grab my bag.”
Or, “I put my laptop in my bag. When I went to grab my bag, I dropped my laptop out of the bag.”
How you phrase your meaning depends upon whichever situation you intended to convey, but the solution is to avoid the use of the word “it” entirely.
Isn’t English a wonderful language? (Sarcasm) 😁
Thanks, that has been really helpful advice!
I will try to keep it in mind and rather re-mention the stuff that I refer to instead of using pronouns for the sake of clarity.
That will be hard for me, though. I do love my tapeworm-sentences with lots of indirections and implicit references… ;-)
I’m no native english speaker either, but have seen people bitching about the supposed lack of design in KDE so I felt I needed to ask
Design as in “graphical design”?
And even if, they probably also weren’t comparing to Win11 design, I guess, because even that is inconsistent (and an eyesore on top…)