Writing Tips: I Am Not Me
Sometimes it is not all about ‘me’. It can be about ‘I’.
Sometimes it is not all about ‘me’. It can be about ‘I’. How do you know the difference? The answer is simple; look carefully at the sentence and make sure the case is correct.
I write this because I received a communication from a supervisor. The grammar was incorrect. Choosing not to out myself to him as a grammar nazi, I chose to write this to help others not to commit the same mistake. This is also for those other closet grammar nazis out there suffering in silence.
The situation was that a group of friends including my supervisor were touring a country in Europe. He wrote: “Joe Smith, Bob Jackson, Frank Andrews and me visited Jose’s Restaurante in Barcelona.” (The names were changed to protect the grammatically innocent.)
He uses proper nouns in the subjective case and an objective case pronoun to describe the subject. ‘Me’ does not belong there because it is not a subjective case pronoun. In fact, ‘me’ does nothing.
I do a lot of things but I am not me when I do them. I am me when I receive them. I might have given it to him, but that was after they gave it to me.
Therefore, if he wrote “Joe Smith, Bob Jackson, Frank Andrews joined me and we visited Jose’s Restaurante in Barcelona” he would have been correct because ‘me’ would be the object of the verb joined.
We do not always think through our grammar when we are writing something quickly for business or even speaking quickly — when the errors are more pronounced, literally. However, I come from a media family. My father was a reporter for a major city newspaper back when journalists were more serious about accuracy. He taught me that if there is an error in grammar, the reader may question the credibility of the whole article. So, it was important to him that his grammar and spelling were accurate all the time.
Relatively few people have such connection to the communications media in their daily lives. The grammar is less important to them, but the impact is not less to the reader or listener. This is especially true for the grammar nazis in your midst.
Therefore, even though we understand what my supervisor communicated, the grammatical mistake undermined the impact of his words, especially to grammar nazis as I am.