Categories
On writing

I, We and the grammatical intracies of me writing about us

If you are a grammar guru you probably take one look at this blog and go, “Argh,” and never come by again.

Sherylyn and I were discussing grammar the other day over a bottle of wine. (I know, I know. We both need lives.) Specifically, we were discussing parallel construction. One example Sherylyn used was:

“I went to the beach; we had a good time.”

This should be either:

  • We went to the beach; we had a good time”, or
  • “I went to the beach; I had a good time.

I commented that this blog is riddled with that particular grammatical problem, because I often talk about me, the person, and us, the writing team—all in the same post. Often I start off talking about me, and use ‘I’ as the pronoun, but then I get on to writing and switch to ‘we’.

Sometimes, when I’m really conscious of it, I’ll take out the ‘me’ and make it ‘us’, but that’s not really fair to Sherylyn. These are my opinions I am talking about, not necessarily hers. Other times I change the ‘we’ to ‘me’. Again, that’s not fair to Sherylyn, because ‘we’ write, not just ‘me’. So in the end I generally leave it as ‘us’ and ‘me’.

I am sure, because of this, the writing in this blog sometimes comes across as quite poorly written.

So be it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *