Who Gets to Decide Whether Wording is Ambiguous?

If you write or edit at work, you’ve wrangled over whether a word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous—open to more than one meaning. Like missing a typo, wrangling over ambiguity is a hazard of your job.?

Even the word ambiguous is ambiguous. Broadly speaking, wording can be ambiguous in three ways:

• Lexical ambiguity—“The dish was too hot for her liking.” Too warm? Or too spicy?
• Semantic ambiguity—“Everyone isn’t here.”?Are all invitees missing? Or only some?
• Syntactic ambiguity—“Carlos ate the cookies on the couch.” Here, an entire sentence can be understood in two ways. Did Carlos eat the cookies while sitting on the couch? Or did he eat the cookies that had been left there?

In Garner’s Modern English Usage, you’ll find three more ways: grammatical ambiguity, grouping ambiguity, and modification ambiguity.

You’ll also find miscues, where a reader is briefly misled or confused by inapt wording, punctuation or typography. There: I omitted the Oxford comma, causing Grammarly, and maybe you, to expect a third example: “1) inapt wording, 2) punctuation or typography, or 3) letter casing.” (If you’re a grammar geek, you're grinning.)

When you write or edit carefully, you strive to disarm these tripwires. You reword here, repunctuate there, balancing clarity against grace. At times, you find your attentiveness exhausting. Especially if you, like Francis Bacon, “write not so that you can be understood but so that you cannot be misunderstood.”

Ambiguity: My lifelong peeve

For as long as I can remember, ambiguity has been my bane, detecting it my superpower.

In 1981, I penned a letter to my local newspaper. Anticipating the row over the Brexit bus ads, I argued that local voters had been misled by a ballot initiative’s slogan, “No more bars, no more crime.” Semantically, that pairing could be understood in two ways:

• “No additional bars, no additional crime.” That, of course, is how voters understood it.

• “No continuation of bars, no continuation of crime”—as in the school rhyme “No more pencils, no more books.” But even in towns where there are no bars, there’s some crime. So it couldn’t actually mean this.

Yet “No continuation of bars” was, in fact, the intent; all bars would now be shut down. That outcome, I argued, was semantically, and thus civilly, illegitimate. The paper agreed. So did readers. They revoted, and the errant outcome was reversed.

A decade later, for my Master's thesis in Technical Communication, I explored how car drivers deal with ambiguous verbal directions (“You Can’t Miss It”).

A decade after that, in a Washington Post essay, I explained what it was like to be—or to live with—someone who finds the most straightforward wording ambiguous (“Does Person 1 Drive Person 2 Nuts?”)

And in 2014, I founded and briefly tended a LinkedIn group, Clearly Ambiguous.?

Sometimes (“No more crime”), my obsession with ambiguous wording has made me a local hero. Other times it has irked my wives—or my superiors.?

Don’t try this at work

In 1978, as a fresh college graduate, I joined a research-and-development department, editing double-spaced report drafts by hand. One afternoon, my manager peeked over my shoulder and saw, to his displeasure, a river of blue ink.

“Paul, why did you rewrite that sentence?” he demanded.?

“Because if I hadn’t,” I replied, setting a trap, “half our readers would think it meant [A], not [B].”?

Grabbing the page, my manager furrowed his brow and studied the original sentence. “You’re wrong: No one would think it means [A].”

I had him. “You’ve proved my point,” I replied. “It does mean [A]; I asked the engineer.” (Try this stunt at your peril.)

Later, as a writer for a nuclear-safety institute, I was proofreading the annual report. When I read “The new control room requires fewer workers,” I bounded to the copy editor. “Some readers,” I explained, “might think we’re saying, ‘The new control room is so cramped, we can’t fit as many workers as we used to.’” It was clearly ambiguous. But not to our editor. Reddening with rage, she refused to even read the explanation I offered from Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Soon, word of an impertinent wiseass reached my manager.

My wise ass was fired.

Normals, sentries, and sleepers?

You know that ambiguous image that, depending on where you focused, could look like a rabbit or a duck? Maybe it took you several seconds to discern the second animal. Or a good minute. Or forever.

Verbal ambiguity works like that. You respond as a Sleeper, a Normal, or a Sentry:?

• If you’re a Sleeper, you seldom find instructions or signs ambiguous because, bless your heart, alternative interpretations don’t occur to you. You don’t get what the fuss is about. And that’s fine. But please don’t become a technical writer.?
• If you’re a Normal, you sometimes notice the less obvious way the passage might be parsed. Usually, though, your brain just filters it out.??
• If you’re a Sentry, the slightest ambiguity or miscue stops you in your tracks; you wonder, “How could no one have caught this?” You’re painfully aware you’re an outlier. But you tell yourself you’re a valuable outlier, the canary in the coal mine: If you found the passage ambiguous, so will some readers.?

Maybe you’re attuned, say, to syntactic ambiguity but not lexical. You get wordplay (“Therapy can help torture victims”). But you don’t get why your partner blows a fuse when asked to “turn up the air conditioning.”?

When I vent about an ambiguous choice of words, I’m often advised, “Why not just go with whichever interpretation is more likely?” Three reasons:?

• “More likely” does not mean certain. Odds are not facts.?
• Your “more likely” might not be mine.
• An ambiguous passage might be interpretable in three ways—or more. Take a sentence like “The new camera is bigger.” Bigger how—in length, width, depth, area, or volume? No matter which answer I guess, I’m probably wrong.?

Who gets to decide

When you’re writing or editing for others, disagreements over ambiguity are inevitable. How clear is clear enough? Who should have the final say??

I don’t have answers. I do have thoughts:

• Turn to textbooks. ?Appealing to authorities is how I roll. It works best when both of you pre-agree, in good faith, to abide by their answer.
• Ignore the Sleepers. A Sleeper has no business advising (much less deciding) whether a passage is ambiguous. Letting a Sleeper have a say would be like letting someone who sees only the rabbit assure you there’s no duck.?
• Listen to Normals; favor the Sentries. Lean toward colleagues who claim to see what others can’t. But make them explain why the passage will—or won’t—trip up readers.
• Don’t look for trouble where it ain’t. Recently, a commenter claimed the writer had used the pronoun “this” ambiguously. But the commenter had parsed the paragraph wrong. Ignore Sentries who see phantoms or don’t know what they’re talking about.
• You can’t “know your audience.” You don’t have an audience; you have audiences: Normals, Sentries, and Sleepers. Novices and experts. Insiders and outsiders.
• We’re lousy at guessing how many readers will be confused or misled. One in ten? One in three? I pull my guesses out of thin air. So do you.?
• Consider the wisdom of crowds. It won’t hurt to run the passage by colleagues; the more, the better. But they’ll be too few to reliably judge edge cases.

That much is clear.

Or is it?

? 2023 Paul F. Stregevsky

About the author

For more than 40 years, Paul Stregevsky has worked as a technical writer, technical editor, science writer, proposal writer, corporate writer, and personal?essayist. He lives in Maryland.?See his?other LinkedIn articles.