Pronouns 2: Grammar Rules

Pronouns 2: Grammar Rules
[English grammar sucks, but I’ll explain some of it anyway.]

The common pronouns:

i/me/my/mine/myself;
you/you/your/yours/yourself;
we/us/our/ours/ourselves;
he/him/his/his/himself;
she/her/her/hers/herself;
they/them/their/theirs/themself;
it/it/its/its/itself….
(Note: yourself, themself, itself can be made plural by switching self to selves.)

Subject/object/possessive adjective/possessive pronoun/reflective pronoun

What does this mean?

The subject is who is doing the action.

The object receives the action.

Possessive adjective is attached to a noun (my chair).

A possessive pronoun does not have an attached noun (the chair is mine).

A reflective pronoun requires another pronoun in the statement and it must refer to the same noun. Such as: I love myself. ‘I love him’ or ‘He loves me’ would be correct, but since the ‘I’ pronoun already exists, I cannot use me properly. It does not have to be a pronoun either, it could be the proper noun the pronoun takes the place of. Such as: George loves himself. (Good for you George.)

It’s complicated. And as I said a few weeks ago, grammar rules are a POS. As long as you follow your own set of rules, it’ll be fine. Consistency matters a lot more than getting these right.

If you have further questions on the topic, please ask. Grammar sucks. Pronouns can be strange.

All else fails? Rewrite the sentence for clarity. Clear and Concise is a desire for writing. That’s kinda why there’s such a thing as “Purple Prose”. Because in even fiction narratives, we don’t want too much.

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