Refer Back

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maureen calling from North Park in San Diego.

Hiya, Maureen. Welcome.

Hi. I have a question about the phrase refer back.

I’m a teacher. I just completed 31 years of teaching in the public school system.

Wow. Mazel tov.

Yes, and I’m going to keep going.

And I was discussing with a friend of mine at the dog park who’s a retired teacher.

Of course, we talk about school sometimes.

And as a teacher, we encourage students to refer back to the text when we are discussing literature or when they’re writing about literature.

We tell them to refer back to the text to substantiate their interpretation or their opinion.

And my friend Harriet said, no, that’s wrong, Maureen. Refer back is redundant.

So I did a little bit of investigating, and I’ve come to the conclusion that revert back would indeed be redundant, but that refer back is legit.

What do you think?

Refer back is totally fine.

Let’s just make that clear from the start.

Refer back is fine.

Refer alone is also fine, but they indicate two different things.

If you refer back, you are referring to something that you have previously done or visited or a condition that you otherwise have already experienced.

You are referring back to something that you’ve seen before, right?

That makes sense.

If you refer to something without the back, if you just refer to the book, then you may actually be going to the part of the book that you haven’t seen before.

You’re going to check the glossary that you might not have read, or you’re going to go to a new chapter and refer to that because it has information that you need and haven’t seen yet.

And so there’s a difference there.

And back is a multifaceted adverb.

It does a lot of jobs that are kind of opaque.

And that’s one of the reasons why you can get, if you think a little too much about back, you can get into trouble and think, well, what am I using back for?

What do you mean give me that back?

Why do I need the back in there if you say give me that back?

And actually what you’re saying is restore to me the thing that I previously had.

And that’s what the back is doing.

It’s saying return me to the previous condition.

And so back is doing the same thing when you’re talking about textbooks.

Okay.

But you would never say revert back because that would be redundant.

You can actually.

It depends.

Revert back is, you know, I’m thinking about this in a software programming context

Where you often want to restore your software to a previous build

Because you’ve made some mistakes in your new code

And you want to go back to when it was all good.

And so I think people do say revert back,

But I think revert would be a better use, yes.

Okay, well, you answered my question.

Thank you.

All right, well, thanks for the call.

Thanks very much. Bye.

All right, bye-bye.

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