Something that's been bothering me...

Hey guys,

After my rather long winded post yesterday I actually managed to come up with some material for another one, though hopefully not as long winded.

My mom is a French teacher and is doing her PhD in second language acquisition. This basically means that she's obsessed with grammar and she taught me something that I have found to be beyond useful in both my writing and in my daily speech.

What I'm talking about is the "You and I" rule. Let me set the stage: my family watches Big Brother religiously every year and last year a girl came into the house named Rachel. She quickly fell in love with another house guest and subsequently formed an alliance with him. Every time she was talking about the game in the diary room she would say "Brendan and I." Which is all well and good except for the fact that she was punching out phrases like: "This is not going well for Brendan and I." Does that sound right? Not quite.

My mom, being the grammar genius, taught me a fool-proof method to getting this grammar rule right every time. Basically: if you can split the sentence in two and recreate the sentence using each subject and the resulting sentence is grammatically correct, then you've got the right subject.

Here's what I mean:

"This is not going well for Brendan and I." Now split this into two sentences:
"This is not going well for Brendan." Good.
"This is not going well for I." Not so good.

To fix the second sentence, simply replace "I" with "me".
"This is not going well for me."

Now put the sentences together again.
"This is not going well for Brendan and me."

Essentially, this grammar rule is quite simple: all that needs to be done is the second subject needs to fit the sentence if it were to stand on its own instead of being tacked to the first subject.

I really wish that this rule was better understood by the general public because after watching Rachel on Big Brother for 2 seasons now, the incorrectness of her speech is driving me up the wall.

I really hope that this helped some people.

Yours,
~Alexandra