One of the most prevalent grammatical mistakes that the Grammar Guru battles (on a daily basis!) is the wrong choice of pronouns in phrases like “between you and I \/ me” or “my sister and I \/ me.” It really isn’t so very hard to get the right one, when you know the trick.<\/p>\n
The trick is to say the phrase without the additional person and see what the real<\/em><\/strong> sentence is. For example: Which pronoun goes in the blank in each of the following sentences?<\/p>\n John and ___ went to the movies. Obviously, you wouldn’t say “me went to the movies” unless you were raised in the jungle by apes, so the answer in the first blank is “I.” But you wouldn’t say “That book is owned by I,” so “me” goes in the second blank.<\/p>\n It has to do with the case<\/em><\/strong> of the pronoun in question. Remember case? That thing your English teacher sort of discussed — confusingly? The two cases that concern us in this post are the Subjective and the Objective.<\/p>\n The Subjective case serves as the subject of a sentence or clause. So when your phrase is the subject of a sentence, you must\u00a0use the Nominative case: I, you, he, she, it, we,\u00a0they. I know “John and they went to the movies” sounds goofy, but it’s correct! <\/em><\/strong>(If the sound of it bothers you, reconstruct the sentence: “They went with John to the movies” or “John went with them to the movies.”)<\/p>\n The Objective case serves as an object — of a verb, preposition, etc. So when your phrase is an object, you must use Objective case: me, you, him, her, it, us, them. Again, this can sometimes land you with goofy-sounding phrases, but they are grammatically correct.<\/p>\n Some additional examples to cement this idea in your head. All<\/em><\/strong> of the following are correct usage:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n One of the most prevalent grammatical mistakes that the Grammar Guru battles (on a daily basis!) is the wrong choice of pronouns in phrases like “between you and I \/ me” or “my sister and I \/ me.” It really isn’t so very hard to get the right one, when you know the trick. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[66,19],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usage-and-diction","tag-case","tag-usage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grammar.editormum.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThat book was shared by John and ____. (Don’t start shrieking about passive voice, it’s just an example!)<\/span><\/p>\n\n