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4. Pronoun Agreement: Subject vs. Object |
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Once you've found a pronoun in a Sentence Correction question, check whether it's acting as the SUBJECT or the OBJECT of the sentence or phrase. Is the following sentence correct or incorrect?
The first step is to indentify the pronoun(s). There are three in this sentence: "she," "you," and "he":
Next, try to define whether each pronoun is acting as a subject or object. Here, she is the subject, and the pronouns you and he are acting as the objects of the sentence:
How do we know this? Because she is doing the action (blaming) and you and he are receiving it (getting blamed). However, he does not seem to be in the correct form. Refer to the chart in the previous section, or to the proper answer to the question "Who did she blame?", which is him not he. ("Who did she blame? She blamed him.")
Both pronouns acting as objects must be in the objective case; as indicated in the graphic above, him is objective while he, used in the first sentence, is subjective, and therefore incorrect.
Here, the pronoun is the subject of the sentence, as the job is clearly not the subject, and there are no other nouns in the sentence. Because the pronoun stands in for "the woman" (some woman), the pronoun should be the subject form of the her/she pronoun as indicated by the chart: meaning, "she". Now let's look at a case that often causes confusion: John and me drank a bottle of wine. Because it's confused so often in spoken language, it can be difficult to tell when the pronoun in the phrase "someone else and me/I" is used incorrectly. But it's actually quite easy to remember when to use "me", and when to use "I": cross out everything in the "someone else and me/I" phrase except the pronoun.
"Me drank a bottle of wine" sounds like caveman-speak and the proper pronoun is clearly "I".
Let's try it again on the following sentence:
Perform the test:
The second sentence is grammatically correct ("I/me" is acting as the object), so the proper pronoun is "me." This test works for many instances of misused pronouns, but to be safe, you should memorize the subject/object pronoun chart.
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