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Lesson: English Grammar - 09

Pronouns

[Page 9 of 28]

A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun. Some common pronouns are "he," "she," "it," "they," and "we," and they keep us from having to repeat a person's name or a thing again and again. We use pronouns to make our writing and speech less clumsy. Thus, instead of saying "David read a book that David liked, and David later recommended it to David's friends," we say "David read a book which he liked, and he later recommended it to his friends." The first sentence, while grammatically correct in the strictest sense, is less pleasant to read because it's so clunky.

Standardized exams love to test pronouns, which is good news for two reasons. First, pronoun errors are easy to spot. Second, they are controlled by one very strict rule: a pronoun is used correctly when you can't possibly mistake what it stands in for. Conversely, it's used incorrectly when there's more than one possible noun that it could represent.

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