Pronouns & Agreement

Imagine commentating an entire match and repeating one name: Virat took guard, Virat drove Virat's favourite delivery, Virat celebrated Virat's fifty... Painful. So we swap the name for a shortcut — he, him, his. That shortcut is a pronoun: a handy nickname that stops you repeating the same noun in every sentence.

Two more jerseys complete the kit. The possessive shows ownership — my, your, his, her, its, our, their — as in her bat or their coach. The reflexive bounces the action back onto the doer — myself, yourself, herself — as in She hurt herself.

The second half of this masterclass is agreement: making the verb match its subject. The golden idea is simple — a verb must agree with the captain of the sentence, never with whoever happens to be standing nearest. In The box of chocolates was open, the captain is box (just one), so the verb is singular; chocolates is only a fielder loitering close to the verb. Spot the real captain and most mistakes vanish before you write them.

• Subject does the action — They play well.
• Object receives it — Bowl to them.
• Verb matches the captain — The team is ready.

Two maps below: a mind map of the whole topic, then a flowchart that decides a singular or plural verb.

Level 2 — the machinery. Every personal pronoun has a fixed set of forms. Learn the grid once and the "I or me" question answers itself: use the subject column before the verb, and the object column after a verb or a preposition.

Three high-value rules fall straight out of that grid:

• After a preposition, use the object form. It is between you and me and for him and me — never between you and I. "Between" is a preposition, so both pronouns take the object jersey.
• its vs it's. its means belonging to it; it's means it is or it has. The apostrophe marks a contraction, never possession: The dog wagged its tail. The same trap hides in your/you're, their/there/they're and whose/who's.
• than I or than me? Both can be right. She is taller than I (am) treats than as a conjunction; She is taller than me treats it as a preposition and is perfectly standard in everyday British English.

Level 3 — the expert edges.

• Reflexive vs emphatic. Use a -self word only when subject and object are the same person (I taught myself) or for pure emphasis (The captain herself apologised). Never as a posh stand-in for me: Send it to myself becomes Send it to me.
• Singular they. Using they for one unknown or unspecified person is standard and centuries old: Someone left their umbrella. It is fully accepted in modern British usage.
• each other vs one another. Traditionally each other is for two people and one another for three or more — a tidy distinction worth keeping in formal writing, though the two overlap freely in speech.

Agreement has its own machinery. In the present tense a third-person singular subject adds -s to the verb (she writes), while plurals do not (they write). The real battles start when the true subject is disguised.

Two subtleties earn top marks. First, British collective nouns may take a plural verb when you mean the members acting individually: England are batting and the team are arguing are both standard in British English, where American English prefers the singular. Second, with neither...nor the verb always follows the nearer subject, so word order alone can flip it: Neither Ravi nor the boys are late, but Neither the boys nor Ravi is late.

Level 4 — the traps that catch everyone. These are the exact slips examiners plant in SSC, Bank and CBSE papers. Learn to smell them before you read the options.

Each sentence hides a grammar slip (one sneaky sentence has two). Tap the word or words that break a rule, then hit Check.