TGIF, Friday Follies followers! The Grammar Cop is prosecuting plenty of pronoun perpetrators. Take a peek!

1. I asked her how her and her father kept warm in the winter without central heating.
2. It has the benefit of showing up on call display. So you can see when people have attempted to deliver even when your not home.
3. We’ve had presentations from other malls in the past, they also want to redevelop, and now Décarie Square is coming to us with their’s.

And the corrections:

1. Let’s break down this sentence into two parts, shall we? First part: I asked her. Second part: how her and her father etc.  We are only concerned with this second part. It is a clause. What was it you asked her? Well, you asked her “how etc.”  What is the subject of this clause? Aha, got you there, eh? The subject of this clause consists of two people: “her and her father.” The only problem is, “her and her father” is wrong. The pronoun “her” is never a subject of anything; it is an object. The subject should be she. So the sentence must be: I asked her how she and her father kept warm in the winter without central heating. Isn’t that better? (Yes!)
2. This is an apostrophe catastrophe, as my witty blogger pal Magick Mermaid puts it! In this case, the all-important apostrophe is missing. The writer doesn’t seem to know the difference between “your” and you’re. Let us remember that the pronoun “your” is strictly possessive: your house, your book, your bad grammar.😉 But you’re is a contraction for you are. Which one is needed here? Right. Here’s the entire corrected excerpt: It has the benefit of showing up on call display. So you can see when people have attempted to deliver even when you’re not home.
3. This is yet another apostrophe catastrophe! In this case there’s one inserted where there shouldn’t be any! Doesn’t it jump out and hit you on the nose? My nose is still hurting! The pronoun theirs NEVER takes an apostrophe. We’ve had presentations from other malls in the past, they also want to redevelop, and now Décarie Square is coming to us with theirs. (The punctuation is also bad in this run-on sentence, but the Grammar Cop is tired now…)

I think that’s quite enough for one FF post, don’t you? Tune in next week when the Grammar Cop will present the latest bad writing samples, gleaned from sources far and wide. So long for now!