Friday, October 12, 2012

It's the Object of the Sentence!

When I taught freshman composition, my students could earn bonus points by bringing in a clipping or a photograph of a grammatical error in print, along with their explanation of the error. Here's what I found in our local newspaper this week:

When the interrogative pronoun is the object of the preposition, the correct word choice is "whom." To self-correct, pretend that you're instead using a personal pronoun--would you use "she," which designates the subject of the sentence, or "her," which designates the object?

To make it even simpler, replace the interrogative pronoun with a personal pronoun and pick the version that sounds correct:

  • Vote for she? OR
  • Vote for her?
If you can remember that "who" is the same as "she" and "whom" is the same as "her," then you'll know that the correct wording is--
Vote for whom?

And yes, there ARE some other grammatical issues with that particular sentence, sigh.

3 comments:

  1. Teresa RobesonOctober 13, 2012 at 10:01 AM

    Oh, that's one of my pet peeves. If I had a dollar for every time someone misuses the nominative versus objective case, I'd be able to buy a vacation home in Vancouver.

    I admit to making mistakes sometimes in more complex and convoluted sentences that involve the use of who/whom, but, good gravy, I get to urge to throttle people when they say things like, "Mother talked to John and I" or "John and me went to the store." The former case happens more. I think people think that they sound more sophisticated when they say "so-and-so and I" even when it's completely wrong.

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  2. julieOctober 14, 2012 at 3:06 PM

    My freshmen, in particular, simply had never learned all the grammar that a person needs to be able to speak and write correctly. When I actively taught it, many (not all!) students were able to apply it at least to their writing. Back then, I attributed it to cuts in public schools that meant that many of my students had never studied a foreign language (foreign language study is SO great for cementing grammar concepts!); now that I've homeschooled for a while, I attribute it to the fact that many students have never studied a foreign language, and many have never studied grammar beyond the most basic concepts.

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  3. Teresa RobesonOctober 18, 2012 at 9:06 PM

    Scott has said that many of his students are terrible writers...I can only imagine what you have to endure actually trying to teach the language mechanics.

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