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 following sentence correct or incorrect?

How could she blame you and he for the accident?

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 above, 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.

Incorrect: How could she blame you and he for the accident?

Correct: How could she blame you and him for the accident?

Let's look at another example:

Incorrect: Her was better suited for the job.

Correct: She was better suited for the job.

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 – and then read it aloud. How does it sound? If it sounds fine, the pronoun is correct; if it sounds really weird, the pronoun is incorrect. In the example above:

"Me drank a bottle of wine" sounds like caveman-speak and the proper pronoun is clearly "I".

Incorrect: John and me drank a bottle of wine.

Correct: John and I drank a bottle of wine.

Let's try it again on the following sentence:

The dinner was eaten by John and I.

Perform the test:

The dinner was eaten by John and I. ?
or
The dinner was eaten by John and me. ?

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 – just in case you can't figure out which version is right after you do the test.

Incorrect: The dinner was eaten by John and I .

Correct: The dinner was eaten by John and me.

A. Introduction

C. Who vs. Whom