How might the character of mr. bixby have been taken from life?
a. mr. bixby was like all of the pilots he had met at work.

b. mr. bixby was similar to many different people on boards ship.

c. the author may have worked for someone like mr. bixby.

d. the author says he was the character named mr. bixby.

to eliminate ambiguous remote or broad reference it is necessary to focus on anaphoric reference. by definition "anaphoric reference means that a word in a text refers back to other ideas in the text for its meaning." the references should be clear and leave no room for ambiguity.

in the first case the pronoun it probably refers to the car but it has not been mentioned before so we should replace it for the car. in doing so the statement becomes clear.

in sentence number   two   the pronoun he refers to charles dickens the author. yet, the first half of the sentence is about the book a tale of two cities. to repair this it would be better to rephrase the first half : after i read   a tale of two cities by dickens, he so as to remove the remote reference.

all of the above