The Pronoun Envy Pandemic

As I sit here procrastinating (again) the doing of the work I make money at, I want to muse for a while about pronouns.

I had an 8th grade English teacher - Ms. Hansen - who influenced me more than I'll ever know.  My colleague Koni Atencio and I took the class together, but I seem to remember more about the class than she does.  Anyway...

Ms. Hansen taught us that one can become lazy with our use of language and in no place is this more evident than in the over-use of pronouns. I see manuscripts all the time where this is the case, and I call the phenomenon "Pronoun Envy."  What is pronoun envy?

Pronoun Envy is when an author uses "he," "she," "him," "her," "his," and especially "it" as often as they can and do not use proper names or other nouns.  Here is an example from an actual manuscript I read a few weeks ago:

John, Robert, Martha, and Elise were at the movies that night.  He told her that she was too good for him, but she didn't think that his giving her peanuts and soda pop was a precursor to being asked out.  After all, she didn't like it, anyway.

Which "he" and which "she" and which "her" and, most importantly for me, which "it"?

I could spend a long time dissecting this sentence for its errors, but let me concentrate on the pronoun envy for "it."  The rule of language is that a pronoun refers back to the most recent noun.  So "it" refers to "soda pop," but when you read the above example, you wonder whether "it" is supposed to be a pronoun for her (whoever she is) being asked out by him (whoever he is).

I see writing like this all the time, even in the many self-published books I get for my Kindle.  This is lazy writing, just lazy!  A good author, and their even better editor, should catch these pronoun envy problems and the errors should never make a final manuscript.  If an author is serious about becoming a great author, then the author needs to learn from the mistakes and not be envious of pronouns in future writings.