Week 1 - Personal Pronouns as Objects of Prepositions

Let’s start with a very common problem, personal pronouns as objects of prepositions. For starters, you might ask “what’s a personal pronoun,” “what’s an object,” “what’s a preposition,” or maybe all three. OK, back to square one for just a minute. Personal pronouns are all those words that take the place of people, like I, you, he, she, we, and they. All the pronouns in that list (the “nominative” pronouns) could be used as the subject of a sentence or clause, as in

We (or I, or you, or she, etc.) ordered ten more copies of Circular A-21 this morning.

There’s another set of personal pronouns, the ones that are used as the object of a sentence or clause: me, you, him, her, us, and them, as in

Pat taught them (or me, or you, or us, etc.) a lot about research this morning.

Now, prepositions. Prepositions are words like to, toward, before, after, between, among, etc. – I’m sure there’s a terrific definition of “preposition” somewhere, but we’ll just go with the examples for now.

Personal pronouns, like the nouns they replace, can be subjects or objects, and in the latter case, they can be objects of sentences or clauses, as in

We gave her ten copies for distribution to the class,

or they can be objects of prepositions (in this case the preposition “to”), as in

We gave the ten copies to her for distribution to the class.

Each time we use a prepositional phrase with a personal pronoun in it, like “to her” in the previous sentence, we’re supposed to use an objective pronoun (me, you, him, her, us, or them). For some reason (instinct, brainwashing by our parents, great elementary school teachers?), we never get it wrong (well, almost never) when there’s only one pronoun. We would never say

We gave the ten copies to she for distribution to the class.

But when there are two pronouns, for some reason people get confused, and they start saying things like

Marva gave the last two copies to she and I.

There are lots and lots of variations of this mistake, but the good news is that they can all be fixed with a simple trick. If you’re unsure what’s correct when you have multiple personal pronouns as objects of prepositions (or of sentences or clauses, for that matter), try just leaving out one of the pronouns:

Marva gave the last two copies to she (you’d obviously correct this one to “her”), or

Marva gave the last two copies to I (this one would have to be “me”),

and bingo, now you have it right:

Marva gave the last two copies to her and me.

One last note on personal pronouns – almost every time you’re tempted to use the word “myself,” you should be using “I” or “me” instead. “Myself” is a perfectly good word, used correctly as the object when the subject is the same person, for example

I sang the song to myself,

but people have started using it when someone else sang the song:

Karen sang the song to Ken and myself,

and I’ve even heard it in a compound subject, as in

Myself and Ken sang the song back to her and Pat (not “to she and Pat,” of course!).

The correct sentence in this case is

Ken and I sang the song back to her and Pat.

We used a nominative pronoun (“I”) in the subject of the sentence and an objective one (“her”) in the prepositional phrase, and we passed Week 1 with flying colors!