The I/me mix-up. You hear it a lot these days. People are in a hurry. They’re talking fast. So they mix up words like “I” and “me”. It’s easily done. But when it pops up in your writing, you’ve got a problem. Word mix-ups distract your readers. It’s like showing up at the office wearing one black sock and one white sock. You may have something important to say, but no one’s listening because they’re all staring at your feet. Thankfully, there’s a very easy way to avoid the I/me thing without having to memorize a lot of complicated grammar rules.
Remember your substitute teacher.
At 3000messages, we’ve spoken before about using a “substitute teacher” to answer grammar questions. The idea is to substitute one word for another. Instead of memorizing a grammar rule, you try swapping out words. This works very well when you can’t decide whether to use “I” or “me”, ”he” or “him”, ”she” or “her”.
Most people have problems with these words when two or more of them are together in the same sentence. A good example of this is the question: “What’s wrong with him and I?” How do you know if this sentence is correct? Use your substitute teacher.
1. Start with your original sentence: “What’s wrong with him and I?”
2. Take one person out of the sentence. Now it reads: “What’s wrong with him?”
3. Okay, that sounds good.
4. Now try the same sentence with the other person taken out: “What’s wrong with I?”
5. Yuck. The sentence sounds really weird. Nobody says, “What’s wrong with I?” They say, “What’s wrong with me?”
6. This means the sentence should read: “What’s wrong with him and me?”
See what happened?
You decided not to say “What’s wrong with him and I?” simply because you would never say, “What’s wrong with I?” All you had to do was try the sentence with some words taken out. (You didn’t have to know that the pronoun is in the objective case, not the nominative case, because it’s the object of the preposition. Whew!)
Here’s another quick example, just to make sure you’ve got it.
1. Start with the sentence: “Her and Sanjay will be at the meeting.“
2. Take out one of the people, and you’ve got: “Her will be at the meeting.”
3. This sounds wrong. So you change it to: “She will be at the meeting.”
4. Now put the other person back in: “She and Sanjay will be at the meeting.”
5. Perfect. Your mother would be proud.
That’s it. Now you know what’s wrong with him and I.
One Comment
John’s explanation above is good, but while using your ear often can work, it will not always be foolproof. If you are accustomed to hearing it in a way that’s considered nonstandard English, then you are stuck repeating the same mistake.
Think of it this way. Pronouns in our language change form (he/him, they/them, etc.) depending on how they function in a sentence. A pronoun can only be one of two things, a subject or an object. So ask yourself what is its role in the sentence? Is it functioning as a subject or as an object?
“What’s wrong with I” sounds awkward because the pronoun “I” is always a subject, and it’s not functioning as a subject in the sentence. It’s the object of the preposition “with.” If it serves as an object, it must appear in that form, and “me” is always the objective form, so the correct answer is “me.”
This might seem confusing if you are not familiar with pronoun forms, but it is not hard to grasp. For one thing, we don’t have many pronouns, and after you have looked it up a few times, you will quickly commit it to memory and you won’t worry about it anymore.
You can learn more about grammar, punctuation, and other writing issues at http://www.WritingWithClarity.com and at the blog http://www.WritingtoInfluence.Wordpress.com.