English teacher: how to use I and me (2024)

It's time for another little lesson from the English teacher.

Several people have asked me to address the use of I and me. These two little words are amazingly useful but are often misused. I've found that mistakes involving the use of these words is a pet peeve of many folks.

I and me are both personal pronouns (words that take the place of nouns). For the most part, the use of pronouns comes very naturally to native English speakers. One troublesome point is knowing when to use subjective pronouns and when to use objective pronouns. Here are the rules for that:

Use a subjective pronoun (I, you, he, she, they) as the subject of a sentence or phrase or following a linking verb (is, am, are, was, were, be).
Examples:

• I love chocolate.
• They left town this morning.
• This is she. (Think about how you learned to answer the phone!)

Use an objective pronoun (me, you, him, her, them) as a direct or indirect object of a sentence or the object of a preposition. Prepositions are the connecting words used to build phrases that usually describe relationship of some kind. Some common prepositions are about, at, before, between, by, for, from, of, on, to, and with. The word or words following a preposition are the objects of the preposition. When you use a pronoun as the object of a preposition, you need an objective pronoun.

Examples:

Now, here's where it gets tricky. When you were very small, you probably said to your mom something like, "Me and Sally are going to ride our bikes." And your mom probably said, "Don't say 'me and Sally'; say 'Sally and I.'" She was trying to teach you that it's polite to say the other person's name first, then say your own name. She was right about that. And she probably had to repeat this rule of courtesy a number of times before you got it. The important part of that lesson was being polite, not using good grammar. But you need to know that you should say "Sally and I" ONLY when you need the subject of a sentence or phrase. If the words "Sally and I" are serving as the object of a phrase, then you need to switch to "Sally and me."

There's an easy way to know whether to use "Sally and I" or "Sally and me." Just take "Sally" out of the sentence for a second. Would you say, "Mom baked cookies for I"? "Please take a picture of I"? Or "Just ask I"? No, of course you wouldn't; you would naturally say "me" instead of "I." So if you would naturally say "me," then you should use "me" in conjunction with the other person's name.

Your mom was right: it IS polite to say the other person's name first. But choose to add "I" or "me" based on how you're using the words in a sentence.

Here's an example: "Let's keep this just between you and I." Between is a preposition, so you need an object of the preposition. The correct wording is "between you and me."

Here's a little quiz for you.

If you answered "I" for number 1 and "me" for number 2, you're right!