ShmoopTube

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Here's you Shmoop du jour, brought to you by spiders.

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That may surprise you, but they're actually pretty good with web based applications.

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How would you correct the following sentence, if it needs correcting at all?

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Even if spiders don't normally harm humans, most people still consider they a nuisance.

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Here are the potential answers...

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For this one we need to know a little something about subjective and objective case.

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Fortunately it's not too hard. So we don't need a brain the size of Texas to do so.

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The subject of a sentence is the person or thing doing something....

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...and the object is the thing having something done to it.

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So in our sentence here, "people" is the subject, because the people are the ones considering doing something.

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This places "they" in the object position.

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Since they're the things being considered.

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The prepositional phrase that kicks off that sentence also lets us know that "they" are spiders.

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But that's not important right now. Unfortunately, for our original sentence however...

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..."they" is in the subjective case, not the objective.

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Therefore we can cross out choice A and continue our hunt for the objective form of the word.

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Choice B doesn't fit the bill either, because "their" is the possessive form of a pronoun.

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We can also eliminate choice D. "These" refers to a choice of two things nearby.

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Since the sentence is referring to spiders in general and not

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spiders in the room with somebody, this is definitely incorrect.

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This leaves us with C, which correctly uses the objective pronoun "them".

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We always encourage people to be kind to spiders.

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Think how much trouble our world would be in right now if somebody had smooshed

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that radioactive spider before it bit Peter Parker.

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