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Pronouns Introduction

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The pronoun is the substitute teacher of the grammar world. It shows up in place of someone else, it does its very best, and people end up lying to it and telling it that their real name is Bubbles McGee and that a dolphin ate their homework.

Okay, it would be kind of hard to lie to a poor little pronoun.

A pronoun is a word that replaces or refers to a noun or another pronoun. The noun that a pronoun replaces is called its antecedent, and a pronoun absolutely, positively must agree with its antecedent.

Pronouns are extremely useful: without them, we'd have to repeat nouns over and over (and over and over and over and… well, you get the idea), which would make our sentences bulky and repetitive.

There are nine types of pronoun:

  • Personal
  • Possessive
  • Demonstrative
  • Reflexive
  • Intensive
  • Interrogative
  • Relative
  • Indefinite
  • Reciprocal

Yeah, you're gonna need a bigger pronoun boat.

Quiz Yourself on Pronouns

1/5

Choose the option that correctly fills in the blanks in the passage.


My girlfriend and ________ went to the convention center for the Everything Magic Expo. We volunteered for a performance, and the hypnotist uncovered all the problems between ________ and _________, sharing them with the large crowd. Talk about a good way to ruin the best date idea I'll ever have.


(A) I, her, me
(B) me, she, I
(C) I, she, me
(D) me, her, I

Can you spot the grammatical error in this 9-year-old's sentence?


"What I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB Gun with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time."


(A) Christmas
(B) Red Ryder BB Gun
(C) in the stock
(D) which

Which of these sentences uses "whose" incorrectly?

I. My car is the one whose top is covered with snow.

II. The blizzard whose hurricane-force winds blew over my fence buried it.

III. Whose going to drive me to work today?

(A) I and II
(B) II and III
(C) I, II, and III
(D) III

How could you rewrite this sentence to avoid using "they" as a singular pronoun?


When someone wants to organize their closet, they can find a lot of great space-saving products on infomercials.


(A) Change "someone wants to" to "people want to"
(B) Change "their" to "his or her" and "they" to "he or she"
(C) Change "someone," "their," and "they" to "you"
(D) All of the above

Fill in the blank:

On our family vacation, we visited Mt. Rushmore, four giant presidents' heads carved out of a rock, ___________was really fun.

(A) which
(B) that
(C) Neither of these
(D) Both of these

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