A village stores drinking water in a covered tank and rainwater for gardens in an open pond. When a technician tests them, she finds that the tank is well sealed but that a pipe leading from it has a crack. Repairing this is urgent because dirt could enter the water on its way to homes. The pond has a different problem: leaves block its outlet after storms. The technician recommends a screen there rather than applying the same repair to both systems. The report would become misleading if every reference to water were treated as referring to one undifferentiated supply. Small expressions such as it, this, and there carry the links between a problem, its location, and the proposed response. Losing those links can turn an accurate set of observations into an inappropriate action.