This is the second 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.

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by Bob Mottram

© 2023

Grammar Article #2

    In the last article, we considered how fluent users of languages worldwide routinely and correctly make their many-per-minute grammatical decisions based not on formal grammatical rules, but rather on HOW THE RESULT SOUNDS. It’s a system that works remarkably well, and we got some practice using it to select the correct pronouns when using multiple pronouns or nouns and pronouns together in the same sentence. We call that the SOUNDS RIGHT shortcut. Use that shortcut properly, and you’ll never make a mistake in separating grammatically correct choices from incorrect ones.

But, what do you do in the less frequent situation when more than one option may actually be correct? Yes, that is possible. Which one do you choose, and why is that choice important?

Let’s say you’re writing a story, and you’re considering these two sentences: “She loves him more than me,” and “She loves him more than I.” With which should you go?

Both sentences sound right, because both sentences are right, from a grammatical standpoint. So, does it matter which one you pick? Absolutely. Because, although it might not immediately be apparent, only one of those sentences will work for you.  You can figure out which one it is by using the FINISH THE SENTENCE shortcut. The trick to selecting the correct pronoun in a case like this simply is to restore the words, mentally, that have been dropped from the sentence.

Huh? You don’t know what words I’m talking about? Well, the fact is, we often drop words both in speaking and in writing, and we count on the recipient of the sentence to restore, often subconsciously, what we dropped. It happens so often that we’re rarely aware that we’re doing it, whether we’re the creators of the sentence or the recipients of it. Follow along, and you’ll see what I mean.

Let’s say you’re a writer who is trying to avoid falling into another pesky pronouns trap.  Consider this. “She loves him more than me.” This sounds grammatically correct, and it is. But, does it actually mean what you may think it does? We’ll find out by silently restoring dropped words, and seeing where that takes us. How tough is it to figure out what words were dropped? The answer is, it’s easier than you might think, using logic and common sense to determine what the words should be and where they should be placed in the sentence.

Here we go, (putting possible dropped words into parentheses).    “She loves him more than me (loves him).” This clearly doesn’t sound right, and we learned in the last article that if it doesn’t sound right, you toss it. So, let’s try again, simply modifying the potential dropped words and moving them to the other side of “me.”  “She loves him more than (she loves) me.” Hey, this looks okay. The sentence works, and we know by using the SOUNDS RIGHT shortcut that “she loves me” is grammatical.

But, wait a minute. Is that the message we really intended to send when we selected the pronoun? What if, when we were writing that sentence, we had substituted “I,” a subjective pronoun, for “me,” which is an objective one?

“She loves him more than (she loves) I.” This clearly sounds bad, so toss it, but don’t give up yet.

“She loves him more than I (love him).” Another winner.

That leaves two grammatical sentences that work. “She loves him more than me.” And, “She loves him more than I.” But you can see by restoring each sentence’s dropped words, “She loves him more than (she loves) me,” and “She loves him more than I (love him),” that each sentence has a very different meaning, and that your selection of the right pronoun is critical to delivering the meaning that you hope to convey.

One more thought about pronouns:

Personal pronouns are unusual, perhaps unique, in the English language, in the way they change form depending on what role they play in a sentence. A problem often raises its head with possessive pronouns, many of which – but not all of which – end in “s,” like most other words do to indicate that they’re possessive. “Yours” means belonging to you. “Hers, his and its” means belonging to her, him and it. “Ours” means belonging to us. “Theirs” means belonging to them. You’ve probably noticed by now that, unlike other possessive words, the possessive pronouns ending in “s” DO NOT take an apostrophe before the “s.” The pronoun that seems to cause the most trouble for writers in this context is “it.” So, remember, if you see an apostrophe there, it’s not a possessive. “It’s” ALWAYS means “it is” or, occasionally, “it has” as in it’s been. “Its” ALWAYS means “belonging to it.”

Your takeaways:

Sometimes a subjective pronoun and an objective one both will appear to work in a sentence, and mentally restoring the sentence’s dropped words is the only way to determine which pronoun is the correct one for your purpose. Because, once the words are dropped, the pronoun’s subjective or objective status is the only clue a reader or a listener has to figuring out correctly what you were trying to say.

And,

“It’s” ALWAYS means “it is” or “it has.”

“Its” ALWAYS means “belonging to it.”

Don’t misuse them.

Coming next:

The two most mixed-up words in the English language: how to sort them out, and a mental trick that will enable you never to confuse them again.