GRAMMAR ARTICLE #1

Submitted by Peter Schroeder

      This is the first of five articles that will share with you some of the secrets that many professional writers and editors use to avoid falling into embarrassing grammatical traps. Author Bob Mottram, longtime member and past president of Northwest Outdoors Writers Association (NOWA), spent more than 40 years as a writer and editor in daily print journalism, including eight years working at warp speed for The Associated Press. What follows are some of the secrets that he and his colleagues used to stay out of trouble.

    These articles were previously published in the NOWA Newsletter. Bob has given permission to publish in OWAC Outdoors.

by Bob Mottram

© 2023

   Stop and think about it. When we speak, we make dozens of decisions a minute. We select vocabulary, word order, gender, number, voice, mood and so forth. And it doesn’t matter whether we are speaking English, Mandarin Chinese or Swahili. If we are a native speaker – or as fluent as a native speaker – we all make our decisions the same way, and not by referring to grammatical rules. We do it by deciding WHETHER IT SOUNDS RIGHT. And that, in a modified form, is one of the major tricks we’re going to use to stay out of trouble.

An important thing to remember is that language always comes first, and then its rules follow. That’s why language rules tend to contain so many exceptions, more in some languages, such as English, then in others, such as Spanish, for example. And this is why the way language sounds to us is a particularly valuable tool.

It’s nice to have rules to fall back on, and we’ll use them in a pinch. But one’s ear for language is faster than a rule book and, when used correctly, is 100 percent reliable in getting us through tricky situations.

So, let’s start by jumping right into an area that’s loaded with potential traps. It involves one of the most problematic categories of words — pronouns. Open virtually any newspaper, any magazine or any website and you’ll often see myriad mistakes involving them.

What are pronouns? They’re generic words we use to substitute for specific identifiers of people, animals or things, so that we don’t have to use words like “Fred” or “Fredricka” over and over. Using them should be simple, right? Most of the time it is. But, for some reason, English speakers often become confused when using pronouns in a series. Let’s take a look at a few examples. Here’s one from a popular outdoors magazine:

“As quests go, it didn’t rank with seeing a snow leopard, slaying a dragon or finding that golden chalice. It did, however, offer a couple of fine reasons for my buddy Johnny and I to be hiking into Colorado’s Hunter-Fryingpan Wilderness early one September morning.”

Here’s another, same magazine but a different edition and a different author:

“So the top priority for Joe and I on this cow hunt was helping Bobby close the deal on his first elk.”

Here’s another real-life example, this one from a Northwestern newspaper:

“The boy said people were holding he and others hostage, pointing guns at his head . . . ”

Forgive me for lapsing here into use of grammatical rules, but I want to set out the problem in an academic sort of way, and then we’ll see how to use a SOUNDS RIGHT shortcut to avoid this nonsense. The rule is that we have two kinds of pronouns in English, subjective pronouns and objective pronouns. Subjective pronouns are used when the party described by the pronoun is the subject of the sentence – the party that takes action and MAKES things happen. Those pronouns are I, you, he, she and it in the singular, and we, you (y’all) and they in the plural.

Objective pronouns are used when the party described is the entity TO WHICH things happen, the object of a verb or a preposition in the sentence. They are me, you, him, her and it in the singular, and us, you (y’all) and them in the plural. In some cases, as you can see, subjective and objective pronouns are identical. But where they are not, they are not interchangeable, and that’s where writers often go wrong.

So, leaving the grammar rules behind us now, let’s see how we can sort this out through the SOUNDS RIGHT shortcut. The mistakes occur when people lump pronouns or pronouns and nouns together in a sentence, but rarely happen when they use only one such word. So, the shortcut is to consider each pronoun or noun in the series one at a time.

“As quests go, it didn’t rank with seeing a snow leopard, slaying a dragon or finding that golden chalice. It did, however, offer a couple of fine reasons for my buddy Johnny and I to be hiking . . .”

(. . . fine reasons for my buddy Johnny to be hiking) – This sounds good, so save it.

(. . . fine reasons for I to be hiking) – This doesn’t sound right, agreed? So, toss it.

(. . . fine reasons for me to be hiking) – This sounds better. Save it.

And, the solution is, (. . . fine reasons for my buddy Johnny and me to be hiking)

Let’s do the next one.

“So the top priority for Joe and I on this cow hunt was helping Bobby . . . “

(the top priority for Joe) – Save it.

(the top priority for I) – Toss it.

(the top priority for me) – Save it.

(So the top priority for Joe and me on this cow hunt . . . )

And, the newspaper story:

“The boy said people were holding he and others hostage, pointing guns at his head . . .

(The boy said people were holding he hostage) – Are you kidding? Toss it.

(The boy said people were holding him hostage) – Save it.

(The boy said people were holding others hostage) – Save it.

(The boy said people were holding him and others hostage)

• Let’s take a look at another example and see how errors with pronouns evolve. The writer is recounting an event that occurred recently.
• “He told her and me to get off his property.” Somebody might think this sounds rather pedestrian, so let’s give it a little class. “He told her and I to get off his property.” Hey, that looks better, so let’s make it REALLY classy. “He told she and I to get off his property.”
• If you get caught in this trap, you know how to get out of it. Simply consider the pronouns one at a time. (He told her.) (He told me.) (He told her and me.)

Your takeaway:

The correct pronoun choice NEVER CHANGES because you use the pronoun in a series with other pronouns or nouns. So, consider them one at a time, and the correct form of the pronoun will be obvious. Then, go ahead and string the words together unchanged.

Coming next:

What do you do when more than one type of pronoun sounds right?