Legal Writing

Quick grammar lesson: Prepositions and pronouns

By Pam_Nelson

This sentence from a TV Squad question-and-answer with the author of a book about "American Idol" made me cringe and stopped me hard:

We all watched and saw that there just was not a great chemistry at all between he and Ryan Seacrest, but do you think it's also fair to say that no one was going to get in the way of the mogul-in-the-making that Seacrest has proven himself to be?

Now the writer could argue that this is just speech and we can forgive grammatical errors in speech, but I say that if it's published it needs to be edited. Of course, I guess you have to know what's wrong before you can fix it.

In case you didn't catch it, "between he and Ryan Seacrest" should be "between him and Ryan Seacrest," or, even better from my fourth-grade teacher's point of view, "between Ryan Seacrest and him." After a preposition (between) use the objective case of the pronoun (him, not he). I would also change "proven" to "proved."

Full post as published by Triangle Grammar Guide on January 19, 2011 (boomark / email).