R&R: Raves and Rants With Amanda Cabot

A Case of Pronouns   

When you read the title, did you expect to see a picture of a packing carton with “He, she, it” and other pronouns tumbling out of the top? I doubt Leslie will be able to find that graphic, so we’ll have to make do with nothing more than words as we discuss pronouns and their cases.

Depending on your perspective, English is either an easy or a difficult language to learn, particularly where nouns are concerned. Unlike German or Latin, which have different forms of a noun depending on its purpose in a sentence, the way English speakers distinguish between the subject and the object of a sentence is by the word’s position in the sentence, not by a unique form of the noun. Subjects come first; objects follow.

Let’s try some examples.

       The cake is in the refrigerator. In this case, “cake” is the subject of the sentence.

         We ate the entire cake. Even though the word is spelled exactly the same way as it was in the first sentence, this time the cake is the object.

Pronouns are different. While position in the sentence is still critical, pronouns have different forms depending on their case. Case, according to my dictionary, is “an inflectional form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective indicating its grammatical relation to other words.” Clear? Probably not, so keep reading.

Pronouns have three major cases: subjective, objective, and possessive. Those terms can be a bit confusing, since “subjective” and “objective” have more than one meaning. In this case, “subjective” refers to the person who’s taking the action in a sentence, while “objective” denotes the recipient of that action.

Subjective	Objective	Possessive
I	Me	My
You (either singular or plural)	You	Your
He	Him	His
She	Her	Her
It	It	Its
We	Us	Our
They	Them	Their
Who	Whom	Whose

       Subjective Case – If Charles was the one who ate the cake, and you wanted to use a pronoun instead of his name, you’d say “He ate the cake.”

       Objective Case – If the book was given to Mary, but you didn’t want to use her name, you’d say, “The book was given to her.” (Don’t shudder at the passive tense here. We’re going to talk about that in another rant.)

       Possessive Case – If we’re discussing people who live in a specific city, we might say, “Their homes are in Cheyenne.”

As long as you know which case you need and have access to a table like the one I’ve included, finding the right pronoun should be easy. Notice that I said “should.” All too often I see and hear errors.

There are a number of reasons people choose the wrong case.

Confusing Position

Sometimes errors are the result of confusion caused by the position of the pronoun in the sentence. Consider this:

          Who should Mary ask to bake the cake?

The speaker probably thought that he should use the subjective case, since the pronoun began the sentence. But Mary is asking someone – the object of the sentence – to bake a cake, so you need the objective case. The correct sentence is, “Whom should Mary ask to bake the cake?”

Multiple Pronouns Serving the Same Function

Errors with multiple pronouns are all too common, but there’s a simple way to determine which case you need. Rewrite the sentence with only one pronoun and see what makes sense.

       It was a busy day for him and I.

“It was a busy day for him” is correct, because the preposition “for” demands an object after it. On the other hand, “It was a busy day for I” is a sentence that makes a grammarian cringe, because the author has used the subjective case. The sentence ought to be, “It was a busy day for him and me.”

What about this one?

          Him and I went to the movies.

“Him” did not go to the movies. In this case, you need the subjective case for both pronouns. The correct version is, “He and I went to the movies.”

Shorthand Phrases

No, that’s not an official grammatical term, but there are times when the best way to determine which pronoun case is needed is to turn a phrase into a full sentence.

What do you think about this sentence? Is it correct?

       Sue was busier than me.

If you thought it was correct, think again. This sentence is an abbreviated version of “Sue was busier than I was.” You need the subjective case. That’s why you should say “busier than I,” no matter how wrong it may sound.

Here’s another example.

       Jim likes her brother more than she.

You’ve probably guessed that it’s wrong, and that’s the case (pun intended). The full version is “Jim likes her brother more than he likes her.” We need the objective case here.

There are other things to consider about pronouns, including independent possessive pronouns and subjective complements, but we’ll save them for another month. Come back in June, when we’re going to tackle the pesky passive voice.

~Amanda

A lifetime of reading and writing, not to mention a host of teachers who believed that good grammar was one of the essentials of life, have given Amanda Cabot such firm opinions about the printed word that I asked her to share some with us in her Raves and Rants posts.  

Although her working career was in Information Technology, Amanda achieved her dream of selling her first novel before her thirtieth birthday and is now the author of more than thirty novels as well as a number of books and articles for Information Technology professionals.  

Her most recent book, A Tender Hope, is the final book of the Cimarron Creek trilogy.

Find all of Amanda's books, newsletter info and social media links here.

R&R: Raves and Rants from Multi-Published Author Amanda Cabot

I'm so pleased that Amanda Cabot is going to be a monthly contributor to this blog. I've always admired her mastery of grammar as I suffer from grammar-itis.

Thank goodness we have folks like Amanda around to help us.

Take it away, Amanda.

Welcome to R&R.  No, we’re not going to talk about rest and relaxation today.  R&R is shorthand for “One Writer’s Raves and Rants.”

When L.A. invited me to write a monthly column, she suggested I discuss grammar, perhaps because she knows that I’ve been known to throw books across the room – at least figuratively – when I encounter basic grammatical mistakes.  She might also have made the suggestion because she knew I once wrote a column whose original title was “In Defense of the Semicolon.”

 

Even though I suspect most of you are rolling your eyes, wondering if you’re going to be subjected to a discourse on that much maligned punctuation mark, I can assure you that there will be no semicolons … at least not today.  Furthermore, as the column’s title implies, there will be more than rants about grammatical mistakes here.  I’ll also talk about things that I see other authors doing well.  But today, we’re talking about grammar, and I’m going to rant about the misuse of the apostrophe.

I can’t imagine writing without apostrophes.  They’re used for contractions and to indicate a word’s possessive case, but – except in one extremely limited instance – they are NOT used to make a word plural.  (Did you notice how I used apostrophes in that sentence?  Those are the correct usages.)

Now, let’s start the rant.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen sentences like the following in published and supposedly edited books.  “They’re having dinner with the MacLean’s.”

What’s wrong with that?  If this were a book set in Scotland where the head of the clan is called “the MacLean,” the only problem might be that it’s missing a noun at the end of the sentence.  Perhaps the author meant to say that someone was having dinner with the head of the clan’s daughter.

Unfortunately, 99.9% of the time when I see a sentence like this, it’s a mistake.  A big one.  In all likelihood, the author’s intent was to say that someone was having dinner with several people whose last name was MacLean.  But our grammatically challenged author didn’t know that the correct way to form the plural of MacLean is very simple – MacLeans. 

No apostrophe! 

The same rules that apply to common nouns apply to proper ones like names.  The plural of chair is chairs, not chair’s.  The plural of horse is horses, not horse’s.  Why would anyone think that the plural of MacLean is MacLean’s or that the plural of Smith is Smith’s?  There’s only one reason I can imagine, and that’s that they didn’t know any better.

What if you were having dinner with several people whose last name is Simmons?  How would you form that plural?  No, it’s not Simmons’.  The answer is Simmonses.  If that seems awkward, I agree.  That’s why I changed one of my characters’ names from Simmons to something that did not end in an “s.”

We’re almost done.  Remember that I said there is one extremely limited instance when an apostrophe is used to create a plural.  Do you know what it is?  Lowercase letters, but only if the apostrophe is needed for easy comprehension. 

Consider the first letter of the alphabet.  I doubt anyone would misunderstand, “The child wrote a full line of As.”  But what about “a full line of as.”  Clearly, you need something to distinguish the word “as” from the plural of “a.”  That’s where our helpful apostrophe comes into play.  The same thing happens with the letters “i” and “u,” but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

So, repeat after me.  Apostrophes are almost never used to make a word plural.

End of rant.

~Amanda

A lifetime of reading and writing, not to mention a host of teachers who believed that good grammar was one of the essentials of life, have given Amanda Cabot such firm opinions about the printed word that I asked her to share some with us in her Raves and Rants posts.  Although her working career was in Information Technology, Amanda achieved her dream of selling her first novel before her thirtieth birthday and is now the author of more than thirty novels as well as a number of books and articles for Information Technology professionals.  Her most recent release is A Borrowed Dream, the second of the Cimarron Creek trilogy.

Find all of Amanda's books, newsletter info and social media links here.