In the last year or two of shrinking advertising budgets, more emphasis has been placed on "churn and burn" marketing vehicles. Lately, our creative team is often asked to produce same-day sales-driven eblasts, site pop-ups or fast and furious Google optimized web copy. There are several helpful web posts regarding common grammar mistakes that one can avoid while writing. These "Writing 101" mistakes may be second nature to you, but for many they rear their head from time to time often requiring a second set of eyes. Some examples include: when to use the word "their" rather than "there" and "its" rather than "it's" as in this list: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6075621.html?tag=fdlead1
What I wanted to focus on though, were the pronoun mistakes that are still often heard in conversation. These "ear soars" are well described on essortment.com:
Pronoun Hell - Pronouns like nouns have what is known as "case" and shift their form depending on case. In other words, within a sentence they may function as subject, direct object, object of preposition, or indirect object and vary their form depending thereon. The dilemma for the speaker is inserting the correct pronoun in terms of its function in the sentence.
Garden variety pronoun errors include-- 'the boss gave he and I a raise.' Unfortunately, correcting this type error takes a modicum of grammatical skill, for one must determine the role of the pronoun in the sentence. Thus, "he" and I went downtown is correct inasmuch as "he" is the subject of the sentence and "he" is a subject-case pronoun whereas "him" is an objective case pronoun. Ironically, and much like the school-inculcated fear of "good," "him" has developed an aura of incorrectness that then drives a speaker to say gave "he" and I a raise, when in fact "he" and I stand in an indirect-object position in the sentence and therefore demand objective case pronouns--"him" and me.
Other common pronoun errors are: I'm taller than "her" (should be "she"). This kind of simple mistake is so widely made that the correct form actually sounds stilted,
but technically speaking taller than "she" is correct since "she" is the subject of an understood verb "is."
Got to run, I'm off to make dinner for my wife & I.... I mean my wife and me!
