People make judgments about us all of the time. And, the higher we rise in our organizations, the more attention is paid to our communications. You may think you know your pronouns, but this test will challenge that "knowledge."

DIRECTIONS
The following sentences may or may not contain errors. If you feel corrections are needed, indicate where pronouns should be changed.

1. I can't say with certainty, but the former committee head may have been her.
2. Between you and I, word has it that Nancy is resigning.
3. I predict the next general manager will be she.
4. We'd be behind schedule without Lundy and he.
5. It will no doubt be them who complain about the pay raises.
6. The one who raised all that money was him.
7. Mr. Brizend distributed the reports to we engineers.
8. In the past, the culprits have been them.
9. The boss sent about a memo about you and I and the volunteer work we've done.
10. For Secretary's Day, Mr. Allison prepared a special event for Tami, Yolanda, and she.

THE EXPLANATION
There are several types of pronouns (words that take the place of a noun). But here, we'll consider only two.

Subject case pronouns:
The pronouns "I, he, she, we, they" must be used if the verb that governs their usage is a "weak" verb. The weak verbs are any form of the verb "to be." Most of those have the word "be" or "been" in the verb. But five forms must be memorized because the verb is an irregular one--you will not see a form of "be" in these five. The five you will have to identify without "be" or "been" are "am, is, are, was, were."

Object case pronouns:
The pronouns "me, him, her, us, them" must be used whenever a preposition governs their usage. These are the most common prepositions: "about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, but, by, concerning, down, during, except, for, from, in, into, like, of, off, on, over, past, since, through, throughout, to, toward, under, until, unto, up, upon, with, within, without."

RECONSIDER YOUR ANSWERS
Look for the word that governed your choice--or was placed in front of the pronoun. You'll see "been" in Sentence 1. Therefore, you must use a subject-case pronoun. In #2, the governing word is "between," meaning you need an objective-case pronoun. For #3, it's "be"; #4, "without"; #5 "be"; #6, "was"; #7, "to"; 8, "been"; #9, "about": and #110, "for."

If you truly want to understand why you may not have earned a perfect score, reread the preceding three paragraphs. And, in the future, test those grammatical assumptions.

1. she
2. me
3. correct
4. him
5. they
6. he
7. us
8. they
9. me
10. her