Using the initial example, you’d come up with, “Clearly, Bob didn’t know what they were doing.” Assuming you know that “they” is supposed to refer to Bob and not to another group, this becomes obviously wrong.) 3. (If you’re confused on this, try substituting a person’s name in the subject. Alternatively, you can alternate “she” and “he” in different instances throughout your copy. “This person didn’t know what he was doing”), but it’s more common today to use “she” as the universal pronoun. The standard used to be to assume any unknown person was a man (e.g. Number disagreements are irritating to solve, because if you have a bunch of them and are writing about a hypothetical or unknown person, your copy ends up being overrun with awkward “he or she’s.”Ī good compromise is to pick a gender and run with it. “These people didn’t know what they were doing” is correct, and so is “This person didn’t know what he or she was doing.” In each of those cases, the number (singular or plural) in the subject agrees with the number in the predicate. The problem is “this person” (singular) being used together with the pronoun “they” (plural). “Clearly, this person didn’t know what they were doing.” This is extremely common, and I can almost forgive it because the correct structure is cumbersome. “Myself” should only be used reflexively, to refer back to the subject. In general, “myself” is a word you shouldn’t find much use for, so if you’re using it a lot, you’re probably using it wrong. In this circumstance, “me” is the right choice. Unfortunately, misuse of “myself” isn’t just needlessly complicated. (It’s the same principle as a barely literate inner-city tenant telling me haughtily that her brother is “presently incarcerated in a corrections facility.”) This is one that people make because they think that complicating the language needlessly will make them sound smart. But I, as a newcomer to these parts, have a few more peeves to add to the pot. Keep that up, with your intelligence taking hits at each turn, and your reader will decide that you’re actually a chimpanzee - and not one of the smart ones, either.Ĭopyblogger has covered grammar nicely here and here and here. You make one mistake and a lot of people will let it go.
But if you’re lax and make a bunch of simple errors, you’ll come across as stupid. If you obsess over every grammatical and structural point, you can come across as stiff.
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