The naked "this"

     Most often this occurs when students are writing essays in which they want to explain a quote, fact or simply a statement.
For example, "Making the mistake of the naked 'this' is very common but easily fixed." This means that you can easily learn the reason why it's wrong so you won't make the mistake again."
     In the above example, the word "this" stands on its own and although the writer may think it is quite obvious that "this" refers to the quote stated before, you can not just assume that reader knows this fact. In order to fix this simple mistake, all you have to do is add a noun in after the "this" so it is no longer "naked," or standing on its own.
    So, it would be better written as,
"Making the mistake of the naked 'this' is very common but easily fixed." This quote means that you can easily learn the reason why it's wrong so you won't make the mistake again."
     Now that the noun "quote" has been added, the word "this" has a noun to modify whereas it was standing on its own before, which isn't grammatically correct.