A few days ago
Rinaldi

Sentence question (learning english)?

In a web site that has users and these users can add new users or friends through e-mail. Is it right the following sentence?

A user cannot delete an invited friend if he already subscribed to the site.

The pronoun “he” in the sentence seems to refer to the user who is inviting the friend, or may be both, but not the invited friend as I wished. How do I do?

Top 5 Answers
A few days ago
Dr. Seuss

Favorite Answer

it acctualy is reffering to the invited friend, you look at the last subject (person in this case) that tells you what it is, also you can use context clues,
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A few days ago
?
Hi!

It sounds ok, but you may want to clarify it like this:

A user cannot delete an invited friend if he (the invited friend) has already subscribed to the site.

Or this:

A user cannot delete an invited friend once the friend has subscribed to the site.

Or:

Once an invited friend has subscribed to the site, he cannot be deleted by the user.

Best of luck to you in learning English!

(It’s my ‘native’ language and I’m still confused by it!)

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A few days ago
Texlady
Your sentence is grammatically correct, but ambiguous since it can be interpreted two ways. For absolute clarity, say, “A user cannot delete an invited friend if the invited friend (or invitee) has already subscribed to the site.”
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A few days ago
psgr
I don’t understand the question…

The user cannot delete the invited friend if the invited friend has already subscribed to the site.

Does that help?

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A few days ago
Curious1usa
A basic rule of grammar is that the pronoun generally refers to the noun immediately preceding the pronoun. In this case, “he” would correctly refer to “an invited friend”.
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