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Subject pronouns (I/he/she) go before the verb; object pronouns (me/him/her) go after the verb or preposition.
Side-by-side comparison
Subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, we, they) perform the action. They always go before the main verb as the subject of the sentence.
She and I have been friends since secondary school, we do everything together.
He is the one who told me about the job opening. I owe him a lot.
They decided to move to the coast after they both retired last year.
Object pronouns (me, you, him, her, us, them) receive the action. They go after a verb or a preposition. "Between you and me", never "between you and I".
The teacher gave her and me extra time to finish because we arrived late.
My parents called us last night to check that we had arrived safely.
Could you send the documents to him directly? It will save a bit of time.
Common mistake
The three most frequent errors:
- 1.Hypercorrection with prepositions: "between you and I" / "for you and I" are INCORRECT, preposition + pronoun always needs the object case: "between you and ME."
- 2.Compound subject with "me": "Me and John will handle it" is incorrect; correct: "John and I will handle it."
- 3.Comparisons: "She is taller than me" (informal, very common) and "She is taller than I (am)" (formal) are both acceptable.
Trick to remember it
Drop the other person and test your pronoun on its own. "John and me will go": would you say "Me will go"? No, so it is "John and I". "She gave it to John and I": would you say "gave it to I"? No, so it is "John and me". If it sounds right alone, that is the correct form.
Quick rule
- •Before the verb = subject: I, he, she, we, they.
- •After the verb or preposition = object: me, him, her, us, them.
- •"Between you and I" = always incorrect (preposition needs the object case).
Did you know?
The error "between you and I" is so frequent that linguist Steven Pinker analyzes it in detail in "The Language Instinct." Interestingly, this error is the inverse result of a well-documented hypercorrection: in the 19th century, teachers corrected the use of "me" as a subject ("Me and John went") so much that speakers developed the intuition that "I" always sounds more correct and educated. The result was the opposite error: using "I" even after prepositions. Linguists like Geoffrey Pullum have noted that "between you and I" appears even in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, suggesting the phenomenon is not as new or historically "incorrect" as prescriptive tradition claims. However, in modern academic and professional English, "between you and me" remains the universally expected standard form.
Practise what you learned
Exercise 1 · Pick the right one
_____ and I are going to the cinema tonight. Do you want to come?
Exercise 2 · Pick the right one
Could you pass the salt to _____ ? I can't reach it from here.
Exercise 3 · Form the word
Related word pairs
The comparative compares two things; the superlative designates the extreme in a group of three or more.
Reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself...) are used when the subject and object are the same person, or for emphasis.
'Which' is used for things, animals, and concepts; 'who' is used for people.
'A' is used before consonant sounds; 'an' is used before vowel sounds.
Bryan López
Founder of SpeakUP Academy