A common type of sentence error on both the SAT and ACT grammar sections involves pronoun disagreement. Pronouns are words that we use to describe nouns, typically because they are shorter than the nouns themselves, and also to relieve repetition in sentences. Pronouns can be broken into two groups – singular vs. plural and subject vs. object. It is along these lines of distinction that most of the pronoun errors on these two tests occur.
Singular pronouns are of course those that describe a single noun, while plural pronouns describe multiple nouns. Identifying when a noun should be “he”, “she”, or “I” versus “them” or “we” is often easy. It gets a little more complicated when the noun that we are describing is a collective noun. Collective nouns are nouns that are singular yet describe a large number of people or objects – think a “group of people” or a “murder of crows”. There is more than one person in a group, but there is only one group, and so when we assign a pronoun to group we will use “it” rather than “they”.
It’s also easy to make a mistake when we don’t know the gender of the person we are describing. Take a look at this sentence: We are picking up our foreign exchange student from the airport today; I sure hope they like dogs, because we have six of them at home! Is this correct or incorrect? It’s actually incorrect. If we are unclear on the gender of a single, specific person, we must use the pronoun “he or she” rather than they to describe them. Even though “it” is singular, we never use “it” to describe a person.
Subject pronouns are pronouns used in the subject of a sentence; that is, they are “doing” the verb. An example of this would be, “She is going to the grocery store.” Whoever she is, she is active in this sentence. An object pronoun is a pronoun used to describe who the verb is being done to. An example would be, “Will you give the grocery list to her.” In this sentence “you” are doing the action and “her” is merely receiving it; here, “you” is a subject pronoun and “her” is an object pronoun. Keeping these straight is very important! “I”, “he”, “she”, “you”, “it”, “we”, and “they “ are all subject pronouns, and “me”, “him”, “her”, “you”, “it”, “us”, and “them” are all object pronouns. Differentiating between these two sets of pronouns is sometimes hard, especially when paired with a regular noun. Personally my mother always got onto me when I would say “my brother and me” – she’d shout, “It’s ‘my brother and I’!” But that is not always the case. The difference comes in whether or not my brother and I are the subject or the object of the sentence. A good way to differentiate is to simply remove “my brother” from the sentence. Is it correct to say “me” or “I”? It’s typically easier when we just have one pronoun to concern ourselves with.
Victory Step Education Team
