Unleashing my Inner-Grammarian. When to use “I”, and When to Use “me”
This morning, I woke up to a much higher volume of direct messages than I have in recent months. I thought they’d all be about the piece I posted here last evening my time about Twitter, but only some of them were.
I received a few direct messages asking me if I realised I had used bad grammar in the title of the post prior to that one, in which I invited you to “join Brian Hartgen and me”.
I explained as best I could in 140 character bursts why asking you to join Brian and me is grammatically correct, and why, had I asked you to join Brian and I, it would not have been. I was going to leave it at that, until I got into a little public Twitter discussion where I was congratulated by a couple of people for using the correct grammar in the title, and how rare it seems to be for people to know when to use “I”, and when to use “me”.
What you’re reading now is the second draft of this post. The first went into a long explanation about when someone is the subject, and when someone is the object. But it’s not necessary to go into that much depth for this one, because there’s a really easy way to know which one to use when. All you have to do is take the other person out of the sentence.
For example, “I will be presenting on The Accessible Friends Network”, means you should use “Brian Hartgen and I will be presenting on the Accessible Friends Network”.
“Join Me at 7 PM in the UK” means you should use “join Brian and Me at 7 PM in the UK”.
Simple, eh?
I’ll never be as entertaining as Grammar Girl, but I love words and do my best to use them properly, and enjoy improving my understanding of grammar. Writing quite a bit over the last year under the sharp eye of a brilliant editor has been a terrific learning experience.
Do you have any linguistic pet peeves you see on a regular basis? Sound off in the comments if it makes you feel better :)). Thanks for reading these posts from Bonnie and Me. Further, Bonnie and I would like to thank you for reading these posts. Right, enough said. Bye bye.