As you may know, the antecedent of a pronoun is the noun to
which a pronoun is referring in a sentence.
Thus, if we look at the sentence, “Many applicants are judged almost
exclusively on their spelling,” we’ll need to first identify the pronoun, which
in this case is “their.” Because “their”
is a plural pronoun, we know we are looking for a plural noun. However, in this case things are a bit easy
because there is only one noun in the sentence—“applicants.” As such, “applicants” is the antecedent of
pronoun “their.”
